1979

                 Ah, 1979.  Quite possibly the best year in all of rock & roll.  At the very least, at this point in the project, I’ll go ahead and say that it’s the best year so far, and I don’t really expect any years after to better it.  So much good stuff going on.  Punk is still in full bloom, New Wave is exploding in all directions (including post-punk), we get major developments in soul/funk/R&B, and even the old guard are doing some interesting stuff.  Career best records from the Clash, the Jam, Buzzcocks, PiL, Tom Petty, & Gang of Four, very solid entries from a whole host of other bands, and the birth of both sub-genres (dance-punk, Second Wave ska, modern R&B) and entire genres (rap).  A fantastic year for so much stuff, it’s hard to know where to begin.

                But I’ll begin with punk, I guess.  Last year I hinted at my disappointment with what the LA/DC kids would turn it into with hardcore, and this year is a great example of what the original punk had that hardcore lost (& replaced with dogma): a real sense of boundary-shattering adventure.  This year, for instance, we get fantastic records from both the Damned and the Buzzcocks that are not only energetic and catchy and unpretentious (the cardinal punk virtues) but also daring and experimental without losing that punk drive and brevity.  For the Damned, this means turning into the kind of psych-pop band that walked the earth post-’67, albeit with a far lower tolerance for tedious jams.  For the Buzzcocks, it means doubling down on all of their Krautrocky experimental tendencies, sounding like a band that could go in all sorts of directions, pop, prog, post-punk, or whatever, all with a punk sensibility and the best ear for hooks of any of the punks (Ramones included).  Sadly, they instead will break up after a last series of singles next year.

                Even more straight-ahead punk still shows lots of life.  X, especially, are starting to really gel into a phenomenal band, even if they haven’t yet shown just how far beyond that basic punk sound they’ll go.  Meanwhile, punk has spread to Ireland by ’79, with the Undertones and Stiff Little Fingers.  I’ve never quite understood why people love the Undertones so much, as they’re pretty much a standard Brit-punk band to me, comparable to, say, Sham 69 – fun, but nothing to get too excited about.  Stiff Little Fingers, on the other hand, are the last great band to emerge out of Brit-Punk.  If you couldn’t tell by the last paragraph, I love me some Brit-Punk – a punk movement unafraid of experimentation but also fantastically catchy.  The only bad thing I can say about it is that it came and went so quickly.  Anyway, SLF: obviously Clash-influenced, especially at the start, although they lack the Mott the Hoople influence of the early Clash.  But like the early Clash, they’re driven largely by adrenaline and politicized anger, and are unafraid to mix in the genres.  Reggae obviously, but less obviously doo-wop, which is a form they’ll return to quite a bit over the years, but perhaps never more successfully than on the punk love song “Barbed Wire Love.”

                The Clash themselves, meanwhile, have moved radically beyond their original sound to make what might just be the finest album in all of rock & roll, melding all sorts of various strains of music into a cohesive whole: punk, glam, & reggae, sure, but also soul, jump-jazz, a hint of disco, and even a dash of Springsteen-style epic rock.  The example of how genre was treated extremely casually in the late 70s.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: purity, in almost anything, from music to politics, is a vice far more often than it’s a virtue.

                Also showing a callous disregard for genre are the New Wave artists.  The Cars and Blondie both are in the position of following up their best album.  The Cars make a good show of it, expanding their sound to incorporate more synths, sounding more modern than the at-times classicist bent of their debut.  A slight step down, but more importantly a step forward, so easily forgivable.  Blondie, meanwhile, really kinda fall down.  Parallel Lines sounded like an accidental hit; a record that, like London Calling, was born out of a restless band throwing styles against the wall to see what stuck (and one of the things that stuck ended up being a massive hit).  Eat To The Beat, however, sounds like an extremely calculated attempt at repeating the formula.  Especially on side one, this is absolutely dreadful: tepid, dull, and overwritten.  Fortunately, the rest of the New Wave do much better than what was arguably the founding band.

                We are getting to the point where we’re starting to see different camps within New Wave, although you wouldn’t say they’re too radically far apart from each other.  One that still gets a fair amount of radio play today is the “angry young men” camp, basically consisting of Elvis Costello and his followers.  Nick Lowe probably belongs in here too, since he’s similarly focused on an articulate, lyrically- and musically-clever, and extremely sarcastic & cynical pop-rock style, although not nearly as angry as the others.  In a sense, these guys are far truer followers of the caustic electric Dylan of the mid-60s than any of the putative “new Dylans” of the folk-rock of the early 70s.  They’re also quite a bit more musically sophisticated than either Dylan’s garage rock or their fellow New Wave/punk acts.  Elvis and Nick Lowe both are pushing more into conventional pop sounds, albeit with an acid lyrical sensibility and attendant vocal sneer.  Elvis himself would claim that he was consciously trying to sound like ABBA on Armed Forces, although he’s better than them.  Joe Jackson, meanwhile, has a solid jazz background that he puts to good use on his deceptively simple songs.  At times, he sounds almost like an angrier Steely Dan. 

                The other big camp in New Wave that gets my attention this year are the Second Wave ska bands (aka the Two Tone bands).  Obviously both the Clash and the Police set a precedent for mixing punk and reggae, so maybe Second Wave was inevitable.  There’s a real argument to be made that Second Wave ska is at least as good as First Wave: it’s less sophisticated musically than the 60s Jamaican stuff, but has a lot more going on lyrically.  It also melds some punk-rock or New Wave elements, which may cause the purists to decry it, but 1) purity is a vice, as I’ve discussed above, and 2) especially with ska, searching for purity is nonsense, since First Wave was born of jazz/doo-wop/folk mixing anyway.  Anyway, the Specials are somewhat secretly one of the best bands of their era, embodying just about everything good about the genre.  Who they really recall are the early Rolling Stones: capable of penning great originals, but also loading up their debut with covers at least as much because of a desire to spread these excellent songs to more ears than from a need to get enough material.  Elsewhere in Second Wave, the Selecter have started touring, but don’t have an album yet, and Madness’s debut is out.  Madness, right out of the gate, are a whole lot of fun.  Unlike the Specials, who can be rather dour lyrically, Madness are basically a party band, mixing ska in with Kinks-style music hall and garage-rock.  I imagine you could dislike Madness, but I don’t really understand why you’d want to.  Maybe if you wanted to keep a proper dour pose, maybe.

                Of course, if it’s a dour pose you’re looking for, then what you want is some post-punk.  There’s a lot of really interesting stuff in post-punk this year, both in the more synth-based older stuff and the new dance-punk of Gang of Four and the Pop Group, but it’s all so incredibly glum and bleak.  I know that a significant portion of my readership can’t appreciate Joy Division because the bleakness overwhelms the fact that underneath these are fantastically well-constructed pop-rock tunes.  I can sympathize, as Magazine especially is a band where the lyrically preoccupation with being as dour and “disturbing” as possible really comes off as somewhat juvenile & off-putting.  I feel incredibly old writing that sentence.  *sigh*  Anyway, it’s all really interesting musically.  Also, a reason why Wire is my favorite of the post-punks: not only a cut above in terms of musical experimentation & composition, but lyrically more abstract and without the self-conscious “darkness.”  Sadly, this year, they’re sounding more like the class of ’78 post-punks, with a heavier synth element and generally more focused on down-tempo numbers and atmospherics than the more punk-based earlier sound.  Still, they churn out another fantastic pop song, with the typically lyrically oblique “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W.”

                It’s a tribute to how quickly music is evolving than you really can make a clear distinction between the class of ’78 post-punks and the new class of ’79 bands.  Chief among these are Gang of Four, who are the first band to really combine punk with disco or funk (apart from the Stones, of course).  They do it in a far more Spartan fashion than the Stones’ dabbling, and the stark, bare-bones sound really suits their lyrical sensibility, drenched as it is in Marxist dialectics.  A sound this distinctive can’t help but inspire followers, and sure enough not only do the Pop Group crop up in the UK, but Athens, GA’s Pylon put out their own version of this sound. 

                Of course, the big name in post-punk is Public Image Ltd., John Lydon’s new band.  They put out their generally agreed-upon masterpiece this year, Metal Box or Second Edition, depending on which pressing you happen to have.  It’s very good, as close as the post-punks ever came to capturing the dread of dub reggae, although it’s more a question of borrowing the sensibility than the sound: apart from the basslines, you’d never call this reggae.  Not at all pop, either, which makes it even odder to watch the old clips of PiL appearing on American Bandstand.  It’s also quite interesting to use as a basis to compare John Lydon/the Sex Pistols/PiL and the Clash.  They both, after all, release their masterpieces this year, and both are double-LPs heavily influenced by contemporary reggae sounds.  What I take away from the comparison is that the Clash were fundamentally a rock & roll band, and John Lydon essentially a prog-rocker.  For the Clash, musical experimentation took the form of a pan-global musical palette, but always used as a platform for constructing tight rocking songs; not unlike a Rolling Stones with reggae replacing the blues and a slightly wider ear for other musical sounds.  Therefore, they put out a sprawling, varied and expansive collection of songs.  PiL, on the other hand, put out a far more monolithic block of an album, uniform in tone and mood, and much more analogous to the sort of thing King Crimson or Can would do: focused on deconstruction of both song and lyric, and making a Grand Artistic Statement.  The Clash’s Grand Statements were always more political, and the polyglot music followed from a political argument for openness and focus on the concerns of the disenfranchised globally. 

                The last major album in the realm of post-punk, or New Wave art-rock, is the Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music.  It’s my own personal favorite Talking Heads record, if only because it’s exactly halfway between the nervy claustrophobic new-wave of the first two, and the expansive Fela Kuti-influenced grooves of their next couple.  Also halfway between the conscious artistic statements of a PiL and the pan-global musical experimentation (and sense of glee in that experimentation) of a Clash.

                It’s also clearly a major influence on David Bowie, and I can’t help but wonder how much Eno is both the conduit and the inspiration for both the Talking Heads and Bowie.  Lodger is the last and least of the Berlin records, if only because Bowie sounds more like a follower here than he did in ’77.  Still, fantastically experimental, and melding all sorts of interesting new sounds, largely the same African and Jamaican influences of the Talking Heads and Clash, onto the template he built with Low and “Heroes.”  His old ’77 partner in Berlin, however, Iggy Pop, is much more conventional this year.  It probably indicates just how much Pop’s ’77 sound was due to Bowie’s influence, but New Values sounds much closer to Pop’s other ’77 record, Kill City.  Which is to say like a slightly calmer and more musically sophisticated version of his Stooges sound.  Not that the calmness or sophistication of an Iggy Pop record should ever be overstated, though.  And he still remains one of the most captivating front-men in rock.  You could make an argument, I suppose, that this is the best representative Iggy Pop record of them all, since Kill City was really a demo collection, and Lust for Life and The Idiot were as much Bowie records as they were Pop records.  Also, because Iggy starts to slide a bit after this record.

                Deeper into the mainstream, New Wave influences are becoming more common.  Led Zeppelin put out their last album (barring odds & sods and archival live stuff), and it’s in a lot of ways a return to the genre-hopping form of Houses of the Holy, instead of the less varied metal-funk of the last couple.  In addition to their more traditional Zep rockers, some ballads, and country, Zep also start playing around with New Wave influences, esp. on “Caroselambra,” which almost sounds like the Cars at one point.  Not their strongest record, but a wholly-respectable one to bow out on, showing them still to be a band interested in what’s happening around them and willing to try new things.  Also a band somewhat surprisingly showing an ear to the ground is Fleetwood Mac, all the more remarkably as the previous two albums sounded like they were recorded in 1972.  Tusk, though, while not the best record they ever made, is certainly the most interesting.  It’s one I wish I had on CD, too, so I could trim off the pleasant but forgettable Christine McVie songs and the downright tedious Stevie Nicks ones, leaving behind a surprisingly credible attempt at New Wave by Lindsay Buckingham.  If ever an album was an argument for a band breaking up, it’s this one. 

                Elsewhere, we still find rock dominated by disco fusion.  This year the Kinks and Pink Floyd both start adding disco to their sound, although in much different ways.  The Kinks more or less just put out a disco record (“Wish I Could Fly Like Superman”), while Floyd take more steps to integrate disco into their sound.  The Wall is an interesting one to try and place in any kind of context.  Definitely much different than anything Floyd had done to date.  Not really a prog record, but one with a whole bunch of subtle compositional tricks that show it was written by a band with prog leanings (my favorite is the unresolved ending of “In The Flesh?,” building to a triumphant chord and instead ending with a baby’s cry, setting up all the tension right at the beginning).  More properly, this is a Kinks/Who-style rock opera, and like those, it can be quite good when it focuses on rocking, but downright miserable when Floyd try to combine theatrical show-tunes with rock (“The Trial”).  It’s also massively self-absorbed, but in its own way both as nihilistic and as anarchist-political as the Sex Pistols.  I can both see why the punks would hate it, and see it as coming from a very similar place.  I have no problem appreciating both, but that may be the advantage of viewing it from a distance.  At any rate, definitely the best rock opera not by the Who.

                And speaking of, the best rock opera by the Who resurfaces this year, this time in partially re-recorded/remixed form as the soundtrack to the Quadrophenia film.  This is one that shows much clearer links to punk, especially to the mod-revivalism of the Jam.  Not as good in soundtrack form as album form, due to resequencing and cutting some songs, but a clear indication of how the Who were simpatico with the punks.  The Jam, incidentally, have their own great leap forward this year, with their stab at a concept album.  By this point, the Jam are full-fledged mod-revivalists, with the tighter playing and rhythmic emphasis vs. their early punk days, plus a fine way with a lyric setting up Paul Weller as a worthy Pete Townshend/Ray Davies heir.  Another argument for the quality of 1979.

                Also (finally) responding to punk is Neil Young.  Like the Stones, not really making a punk record (although “Sedan Delivery” is pretty punk), but rather making a record in his own personal style responding to the energy of punk.  For half the record this means stripping down his folk sound to its barest essentials, and for the second half cranking up the distortion.  A record so nice he basically released it a second time as Live Rust, which duplicates all of the electric side (except the surprisingly terrible “Welfare Mothers”) along with a greatest hits of both his acoustic and electric material to date.  The electric live stuff especially is as good as or better than the studio stuff.  This was the record that first got me into Neil Young, and I’d still recommend it over any greatest hits or single album as the place to start.  However, I also understand why people might have been grumpy at Young duplicating himself so quickly.

                At least he didn’t flat out embarrass himself, though, like Dylan did in his At Budokan album, slathering his old classics with big-band arrangements that more than anything recall Neil Diamond or (slightly more charitably) Elvis in his ‘strung-out-&-no-longer-caring’ period.  Interesting but terrible, in the same sense as Bowie’s David Live, but (thankfully) not signaling a new direction.  Rather, Dylan’s new direction is to go Christian, which inspired him to put out a pretty good album, but honestly didn’t change his core sound very much.  He is starting to drift hard into irrelevance here.

                Of course, Dylan’s At Budokan suffers in comparison not only to his previous work, but also to the other At Budokan released this year, Cheap Trick’s.  Like Young’s Live Rust, this is a record that’s as good as a greatest hits (albeit for a band much earlier in its career).  A good indication that non-punk pop-rock is actually doing pretty ok in 1979.  By the same token, ELO is still more good than bad, although starting to sound a touch overwrought, perhaps.  Also, although he may still count as New Wave, Tom Petty puts out the best of his early rockin’ albums, but of course, Petty doesn’t really do albums as cohesive works, so that really just means, puts out another lp, this one with his highest killer-to-filler ratio.  Still working a Stones-Byrds sound that’s raw & fast enough to be punk, but much more studied in its songcraft and tight in its performance, yet trad enough to not really fit as New Wave. 

On the R&B side of things, it’s a good year for the new wave (small caps), but not so hot for the old wave.  Stevie Wonder finally follows up Songs In the Key Of Life with a disco-orchestral film score (with a couple of pop songs).  It’s not bad, per se, but it’s not especially interesting, either.  This is one where reviewing an artist entirely in hindsight works to the album’s advantage.  For me, who picked up Stevie Wonder albums as fast as I could locate them on LP, Secret Life of Plants was always just a minor aside, a blip between Songs in the Key of Life and Hotter Than July.  But at the time, for Stevie to have dropped such a masterpiece in ’76, and then gone completely dark for 3 years, then to return with this mediocrity must have been mighty disheartening.  Meanwhile, Marley follows up his masterpiece with Survival, an album that doesn’t have any obvious hits but is quite strong, almost sounding like a return to his earlier, more stripped sound.   Not having any Legend tracks for the more superficial fans, and not being one of the early albums that the fans who dig deeper go for, I’ve always felt like this is one that just kinda gets passed over by Marley fans.

On the more funk end of things, Parliament is still going, although undeniably slipping from last year’s peak.  Far more exciting is what’s newer in the world of funk.  Prince and Rick James both were already active last year, but while Prince is still mighty conventional, Rick James is developing nicely.  A strong argument can be made, I think, that if the goofily theatrical P-Funk sound was analogous to glam rock, James’s harder, more bare-bones funk is funk’s punk equivalent.  Not that it sounds much like the actual funk-punk of Gang of Four et. al. though – and better than them musically, if not as distinctive lyrically.  The biggest news in soul/funk/R&B, however, is the debut of Michael Jackson as an adult solo artist.  Off The Wall is the first of the trilogy of albums that would make him a legend, and it’s a pretty remarkable step forward in the development of R&B.  Obviously indebted to the Jackson Five’s later stuff (when they were The Jacksons), but sounding not at all like the classic Motown sound.  A disco influence, sure, but also a more stripped sound, and a willingness to do softer, more Beatle-esque ballads.  Somewhat astonishing how much modern pop music still sounds like this record.

Finally, I’ve previously tagged R&B as a genre that is more evolutionary than revolutionary, in that it changes over time, but seldom has great leaps forward.  One of those is arguably Off The Wall, but another is indisputably the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.”  At the time, you could be forgiven for mistaking rap as a novelty.  After all, “Rapper’s Delight” is not technically the first rap song; that would be “Personality Jock” by Fatback (also this year).  Fatback were a forgettable funk band, and their rap song undeniably was a novelty.  But, as we’ll see soon enough, rap itself was by no means just a gimmick. 

So 1979 was a very good year for a lot of music, especially funk & pop-rock.  What wasn’t it so hot a year for?  Mostly prog and roots-rock.  Prog is basically a dead genre at this point: the most exciting art-rock of the 80s will be post-punk, not prog, and the major prog bands of the 70s that keep making worthwhile records will either turn to New Wave or post-punk for their inspiration.  And I have never been able to care even a little about the new 80’s prog bands, of the likes of the Alan Parsons Project or Marillon.  You do get a pair of Zappa records this year that are among my personal favorites.  Joe’s Garage is another of Zappa’s not-to-be-taken-seriously rock operas, but is for whatever reason my Zappa Rosetta Stone.  After years of friends & family throwing Zappa records at me, trying to get me to like him, this was the one that made me turn a corner.  Maybe because it’s the easiest one to just appreciate Zappa & band as an instrumental unit, and leave all his somewhat off-putting lyrical obsessions and all their baggage to the side.  The other Zappa record, Sheik Yerbouti, is the closest he ever came to a straight up novelty record, though, so comes with a healthy dosage of said lyrical obsessions.  Fun, but it plays like a joke band with chops for a good portion of it.

Jethro Tull also have the last of their folk-rock albums, but they’re not at all a prog band anymore, and much more just straight folk-rock.  Not a bad thing in itself, but it’s by far the weakest of the folk-rock trilogy, and while pleasant enough while it’s playing, just not distinctive.  And that, plus a very good Townes Van Zant live album, is pretty much all the roots rock I have on offer this year.  Unlike prog, it’s a genre that will continue and revive, but it’s pretty weak this year, at least in my collection.  I don’t even have any live Grateful Dead from 79.

So now we enter the 1980s.  I’m pretty excited about this, actually.  I had a pretty good sense of how music changed in quality and evolved in the last 20 years, that the 60s would basically linearly increase in quality and the 70s would be more U-shaped, but while I know that a bunch of good music was released in the 80s, I have no idea how it all fits chronologically.  Ironic, since it’s the first decade I lived through, but my age 1-11 musical exposure was a touch limited, I think….

Song of the Year:  Buzzcocks – “I Believe”.  Because it’s the punk-rock “Hey Jude,” because it combines both the Buzzcocks’ pop sense and prog/post-punk ambitions, because it’s just straight-up great.  Although I very nearly picked Cookie Monster’s “I Lost My Cookie At the Disco.”

Album of the Year:  The Clash – London Calling.  In my opinion, the greatest album in all of rock & roll.  Experimental but accessible, intelligent but not pretentious, progressive both musically and lyrically, and ultimately optimistic but clear-eyed.  When I made Exile On Main St. my album of the year way back in 1972, I said it was one of a handful of albums I refuse to be without for any length of time.  This is another one.

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Talking Heads.  I knew they were a great band, but I didn’t realize until listening to them in context just how they were the best American art-rock band of their era.  To put it in modern (& standardized testing) terms: Talking Heads:New Wave::Radiohead:alt-rock/indie.

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  The Pop Group.  At the time, I wondered why the early ‘00s post-punk revivalists borrowed so heavily from Gang of Four and not at all from Wire.  The difference, I think, is that to follow in Wire’s footsteps, you need a fractured compositional genius.  To mimic the Gang of Four, all you really need is a decent-ish drummer and the right effects pedals.  The Pop Group aren’t bad, but neither are they actually musically revelatory; they’re just the first to crack the Gang of Four formula of effects-free funk guitar + vaguely anarchistic lyrics.  Then they do some tuneless noise-jamming for the critics.

Album List

ABBA - Gold

AC/DC - AC/DC

Aerosmith - Aerosmith's Greatest Hits

Blondie - Best Of Blondie

Blondie – East To The Beat

Blue Öyster Cult - Workshop Of The Telescopes

Bob Dylan – At Budokan

Bob Dylan - Greatest Hits Volume 3

Bob Dylan - Vol. 3: Rare And Unreleased, 1974-1991

Bob Marley – Survival

Bruce Springsteen - 18 Tracks

Buzzcocks - A Different Kind Of Tension

Buzzcocks - Singles Going Steady

Cheap Trick – At Budokan

Cheap Trick - The Authorized Greatest Hits

Danger Mike - DISSONANCE

David Bowie - Best Of Bowie

David Bowie – Lodger

Devo - Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology

Electric Light Orchestra - Strange Magic: The Best Of Electric Light Orchestra

Elvis Costello – Armed Forces

Elvis Costello - Best Of

Elvis Costello - Out Of Our Idiot

Fleetwood Mac - The Very Best Of Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac – Tusk

Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage - Act I and II

Frank Zappa - Joe's Garage - Act III

Frank Zappa – Sheik Yerbouti

Gang Of Four - Entertainment!

George Harrison - Best Of Dark Horse 1976-1989

Goblin - Goblin

Graham Parker – Squeezing Out Sparks

Iggy Pop - New Values

J.J. Cale - Very Best Of

Jethro Tull – Stormwatch

Jimmy Buffett - Songs You Know By Heart

Joe Jackson – I’m The Man

Joe Jackson – Look Sharp!

John Lennon - Imagine Soundtrack

Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers - The Beserkley Years: The Best Of Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers

Joy Division - 13 July 1979 - The Factory

Joy Division - Les Bains Douches: 18 December 1979 [Live]

Joy Division - Substance 1977-1980

Joy Division - The Complete BBC Recordings [Live]

Joy Division - The Factory 13 July 1979

Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures

Judas Priest - Metal Works '73-'93

Led Zeppelin - In Through The Out Door

Madness – One Step Beyond

Madness - Total Madness: The Very Best Of Madness

Magazine - Rays And Hail 1978-1981: The Best Of Magazine

Michael Jackson - Off The Wall

Michael Jackson - The Essential Michael Jackson

Midnight Oil - 20,000 Watts R.S.L.: Greatest Hits

Motörhead - No Remorse

Neil Young – Live Rust

Neil Young - Rust Never Sleeps

Neil Young – Rust Never Sleeps

Nick Lowe - Basher: The Best Of Nick Lowe

Nick Lowe - Nutted By Reality

Parliament - Tear The Roof Off 1974-1980

Patti Smith - Outside Society

Paul McCartney - Wingspan: History

Paul McCartney - Wingspan: Hits

Pink Floyd - The Wall

Prince - The Hits

Public Image Ltd. - Second Edition

Pylon - Gyrate Plus

Queen - Greatest Hits

Rick James - Motown Legends: Give It to Me Baby

Rick James - The Ultimate Collection:  Rick James

Roxy Music - The Best Of Roxy Music

Sid Vicious – Love Kills N.Y.C.

Squeeze - Singles 45's And Under

Stevie Wonder - At The Close Of A Century

Stevie Wonder – Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants

Stiff Little Fingers - Inflammable Material

Talking Heads – Fear of Music

Talking Heads - Sand In The Vaseline

Tangerine Dream – Force Majeure

The Cars – Candy-O

The Cars - The Cars Greatest Hits

The Chieftans – Boil The Breakfast Early

The Clash - Clash On Broadway

The Clash - London Calling

The Clash - Super Black Market Clash

The Clash - The Vanilla Tapes

The Damned - Machine Gun Etiquette

The Fall - 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden Greats

The Jam - Compact Snap

The Jam - Setting Sons

The Kinks - Come Dancing With The Kinks

The Police - Every Breath You Take: The Singles

The Pop Group - Y (最後の警告)

The Selecter - BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert

The Specials - BBC Radio 1 Live In Concert

The Specials - The Singles Collection

The Specials - The Specials

The Upsetters - Arkology II: Dub Shepherd

The Upsetters - Arkology III: Dub Adventurer

The Who – Quadrophenia soundtrack

The Who – The Kids Are Alright

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Playback I: The Big Jangle

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Playback IV: The Other Sides

Toots & The Maytals - Time Tough - The Anthology

Townes Van Zandt - Rear View Mirror

V/A - 12 Classic 45s

V/A - Back In The Day Jamz

V/A - Beleza Tropical: Brazil Classics 1

V/A - Children Of Nuggets I

V/A - Children Of Nuggets II

V/A - Children Of Nuggets III

V/A - Old School I

V/A - Post Punk Chronicles: Left Of The Dial

V/A - Pure Funk

V/A - Trojan Dub Massive Chapter I

Wire - 154

X - Beyond & Back: The X Anthology