JDMcDsblog

Tonight’s Prom Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 included a rare performance of Gustav Holst’s Choral Symphony, and indeed a Proms debut.  The second movement is the most beautiful; a setting of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” The image of a moment frozen in time yet timeless is given melancholic expression by the haunting phrase;
“heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”, while we imagine the young man about to steal a kiss,  so near yet so far;
“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,  
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;  
    She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,  
  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! ”
The poem is almost heart breaking in its reflection of the transitory nature of life; all shall fade except this Attic urn with its “cold pastoral” scene of everyday life from another time and place;

When old age shall this generation waste,  
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe  
  Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,  
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all  
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Got my niece a copy of “1001 albums to listen to you before you die“, one of a huge number of lists books, all exorting or advising to get on and travel, read, listen, eat, visit a thousand things or so before you die. It’s shameless nostalgia and also controversial as not everyone ever agrees with such lists. I think I can live without ever listening to all the albums the authors recommend, but there are some “essentials” (now, there’s a Classic FM adjective!). The Beatles White Album is there, as is Abbey Road. Taking me back to 1970s Greenock Academy, I see the Yes Album, and its antithesis; the soundtrack to Shaft, along with other schoolday icons such as ELP’s “Pictures at An Exhibition”. Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Genesis’ Lamb Lies Down in Broadway.. I particularly remember Autobahn, by German technogroup Kraftwerk, who provided the soundtrack to four mad, funpacked weeks of archaeological digging at the Peel of Lumphanan in Deeside in 1979. Old smoothies are there too; Count Basie and Frank Sinatra.

What I’d like to know is, what 5 albums would you put into such a list. If you have any suggestions, post them here!