#Biggest debut album of all time full#
#Biggest debut album of all time download#

The Band were massively influential: everyone from The Beatles, Beach Boys and Grateful Dead borrowed their progressive country chic. “Lately, they’ve been calling it music again.” “A few years ago, we’d play and people would call it nostalgia,” noted bassist/vocalist Rick Danko. Hanging out with Bob Dylan paid off: by 1968, The Band had their songwriting chops oiled and tightened, and Capitol Records’ backing for a debut that eschewed the era’s experimentation for rootsy, earthy, folky, harmony-rich songs exemplified by The Weight. Mick and Keef barely squeeze their creative juices, but the sound and sneer are already in place, and it still managed to take over from With The Beatles at the top of the UK chart. The lazy shuffle of Jimmy Reed’s Honest I Do, Brian Jones’s slide stings on Slim Harpo’s I’m A King Bee, Keith’s delinquent swagger through Chuck Berry’s Carol: formative foundations upon which the Stones were to build the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world.Įven as nonentities, the Stones oozed arrogance, pointedly leaving their name off the sleeve of even their first album (the subtext: ‘You’ll soon know who we are.’). Tell Me, an engaging Brill Building pop facsimile, bodes well as an early sighting of a soon-to-be gilt-edged Jagger/Richards compositional credit, but three-quarters of the album’s dozen songs are a rag-bag of punchy R&B covers.

#Biggest debut album of all time download#

Often overlooked, invariably under appreciated, the Stones’ eponymous debut album – inexplicably unavailable with its original UK track-listing on CD, though iTunes can still oblige with an accurate download – captures the band in their original incarnation as evangelical purveyors of authentic rhythm and blues. How many other global-rock-stars-in-waiting would chuck in knowing references to both 90s lad’s mags (‘ She’s my high street honey’) and British schooyard vernacular (‘ She knows what she’s got, she’s so shit hot’), fully aware that both will baffle the inhabitants of Arsegrapes, Iowa? Hats off for the sheer chutzpah of it.ĩ6. In a world of cookie-cutter rock frontman, he’s got the cheek and the sense of humour to flatten the competition. From his ringing voice and proudly protuberant gnashers to the Zandra Rhodes frocks he sports onstage, he’d be a dream casting in the long-gestating biopic of the late singer. Those Queen/Mercury comparisons are hard to shake, especially in Spiller’s case.

By the time it gets to the skyscraping chorus, he’s rolling his ‘r’s for all he’s worth: ‘ Rrrroll up, rrrroll up, rrrrrrrrrrroll for satisfaction.’ ‘ I’ll welcome you in with Lambrini and gin, the perfect of sins,’ coos singer Luke Spiller, one part Freddie Mercury, one part Robin Askwith. Catchy-as-ebola opening track Roll Up imagines a fantasy Carry On world in which The Struts are bolshy young sultans presiding over a harem of (presumably) dutiful ‘lovelies’. Either way, you’ve gotta hand it to ’em for not giving the slightest of fucks.īut then self-belief is clearly not an issue here.

Roger Manning - one half of Jellyfish’s creative double-act with Andy Sturmer – said that they were aiming for a sound “somewhere between Queen and the Patridge Family” and if they didn’t fit in the grunge years, their the boho-psychedelic look and finely-tooled classicism meant you could file them with retro-spirits of the time like the Black Crowes and World Party.Įverybody Wants (or as it appears on the cover, Everybody Wants… The Struts – geddit?) is an unashamed old school rock’n’roll album, which, given mainstream culture’s current disdain for guitars makes The Struts either the bravest or stupidest young band out there.

#Biggest debut album of all time full#

Released in 1990, Bellybutton was 10 vibrant songs stuffed full of wit and invention, with the pop sheen you’d expect from a record produced by Albhy Galuten, the guy who had recorded the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever. Their tragedy was that the band surfaced at the point when the music business swam into the darker, gloomier waters of grunge, and Jellyfish were doomed to drift out of time and place. The best of these sounded like smash hits from the two previous decades that had somehow escaped the collective memory. Formed in 1989 and inspired by the music they’d discovered on FM radio while growing up in 70s suburban California – The Beatles, the Beach Boys, Cheap Trick, ELO, 10cc, Fleetwood Mac, Wings and more – Jellyfish’s debut album was packed with wondrous pop-rock songs, labyrinthine harmonies, soaring string arrangements and melodies as evocative as a Californian sunrise.