Ever since I was a kid I had been imagining myself at forty, if only because it arrived a week before the year 2000. The science fiction books of the early seventies promised me a brave new world, a space age utopia of silver jump suits, jet packs, robots and inter galactic travel, and as I grew older and obsessed with music, I began to imagine what it might sound like too. The future would be now and that now would be 2000 AD. And yet, for some reason I never imagined myself beyond that, say in 2010 or 2020. Those dates held no significance at all, a part of me convinced that as soon as the clock struck midnight on New Millennium Eve I would simply disappear into the ether.
While my futuristic childhood dreams failed to become reality, in the first half of the decade there were a couple of technological advances in music that threatened to match them. The expansion of the MP3 format and the arrival of iTunes changed the rules of making and listening to music forever, and in so doing sparked a revolution in consumerism that had nothing to do with artists or new genres and everything to do with science. The invention of the iPod and the advent of illegal downloading and sharing allowed us to access music, anytime, anyplace, anywhere while the inevitable demystification of computer software allowed any kid with a PC to create music from the comfort of their own bedroom.
The MP3 also revitalised interest in the past as online digital archives opened the flood gates of once forbidden and forgotten territories to make every song ever recorded available with the click of a mouse. I was no different and like a lot of other obsessives felt a burning desire to hear to all those hallowed artists and records from the ‘Rock Canon’ I’d happily been ignoring. For the first and last time I stopped focusing on new music and instead spent a crazy year listening incessantly to everyone from The Beatles to Neil Young and from Dylan to Frank Zappa before realising that actually they had nothing to say to me and weren’t worth the disk space.
You would have thought that that with the musical past becoming so easily available in the present that artists would really start to push the boundaries of what was possible creatively, but unfortunately, if anything, the reverse was true. For the likes of Coldplay, Keane, Snow Patrol, Elbow and the overwhelming tide of landfill indie outfits, shifting units became an end in itself. What made it worse was that so many people seemed to love their approach to making music, no doubt because the banal emotions, lyrical platitudes and lack of any actual point perfectly reflected their own propensity for selling out and submitting to consumerism.
While those groups and hundreds like them replaced substance and principle with an empty popularism, as someone who has always believed that music serves a more useful function than being just a soothing background balm, I continued to seek out for those more daring artists who believed in things so strongly their music was suffused with those beliefs, no matter whether they were ridiculous, muddled, naïve, apocalyptic, obscure, scary or just plain challenging.
Now I’m not going to lie but in that respect the noughties were a hell of a lot more of a challenge than I was expecting. Whether that was because I was distracted by my real life getting in the way or merely becoming complacent in my middle age, musically the last couple of years were depressing. In fact, so miserable were they that in 2009 I even began to question whether my lifelong commitment to the power of music had actually been worth it before rightfully coming to the conclusion that despite my temporary lack of enthusiasm and oomph, as always the songs I invest in make my world a better place by conjuring up tantalising visions of a better existence and providing me with a place to hide from the harshness of troubled and troubling times. Listening to the 100 songs here, I am more certain of that than ever!
Chris Green
August 2025
2000
01. CASINO VERSUS JAPAN ‘It’s Very Sunny’ (Go Hawaii LP January 2000)
What better way to start the new millennium than with the mysterious, suitably futuristic and maverick sound of Casino Versus Japan and Erik Kowalski’s hummable, computer aided, ode to the weather, a state of mind and God knows what else?
02. LAMBCHOP ‘Up With People’ (Nixon LP February 2000)
A drowsy masterpiece pushing the nineties no depression, alternative country movement in an unpredictable direction, the lush strings and languid horns of Nixon wrapped Kurt Wagner’s stretched falsetto in an otherworldly, soulful glow. Ballad heavy and infused with a rare kind of beauty, grace and nostalgic wistfulness impossible to define, songs like ‘The Old Gold Shoe’, ‘Grumpus’ and ‘Up With People’ defied categorisation.
03. EMINEM ‘The Real Slim Shady’ (The Marshall Mathers LP May 2000)
At the turn of the new century it felt positively dangerous to think of a white boy nearing the aesthetic zenith of hip hop, the ultimate celebration of black maleness. Then again, because of his colour Eminem had to be twice as good to get ahead, and he was. The first big star of the 21st century, The Marshall Mathers LP was a brilliantly dark, often twisted, commentary on the decline of the American Empire, provoking debate on everything from the working class males fear of homosexual feelings to how the values of the traditional Gods had been replaced by the moral vacuum of hard cash. A behemoth of an album, I could have picked any song to represent its greatness, but the motor mouthed parent baiting of ‘The Real Slim Shady’ just about nicks it.
04. DEAD PREZ ‘Animal In Man’ (Let’s Get Free LP May 2000)
Kicking off with a soundbite from Beneath The Planet Of The Apes and driven by an infectious G-Funk bass, ‘Animal In Man’ was a retelling of Orwell’s Animal Farm without the party politics. Indeed, so simple was it that a decade later I used it to try and explain the concepts of power and betrayal to my ten year old daughter. Given her age obviously I was doomed to fail, but she loves the song to this day.
05. BLACK BOX RECORDER ‘The Facts Of Life’ (The Facts Of Life LP May 2000)
Another of Luke Haines and John Moore’s wonderfully English, sinister tales of adolescence and one that actually made it into the UK singles charts until Haines killed it stone dead by hilariously dismissing their record label as ‘a bunch of fucking cunts’.
06. GOLDFRAPP ‘Lovely Head’ (Felt Mountain LP September 2000)
A delightfully disturbing trip into darkness and corruption, Alison Goldfrapp and film composer Will Gregory’s collaboration produced an album inspired by a time when sultry cabaret types sang their songs of woe in seedy, velvet wall lined, European dens of iniquity, the menacing bass, John Barry strings and enigmatic whistling of ‘Lovely Head’ reminiscent of a beguiling if bizarre cross between James Bond and The Fifth Element soundtrack.
07. BLUR ‘Black Book’ (Single B Side October 2000)
The A Side that never was, ultimately ‘Black Book’ ended up in a supporting role to the less than great ‘Music Is My Radar’, a promotional single for Blur’s best of compilation and remains relatively unknown even amongst their more devoted fans. Taking the gospel element of ‘Tender’ to its absolute limit by building to an even bigger crescendo, Damon Albarn’s lyrics swearing undying devotion to a partner echoed my own thoughts on that feeling they call love.
08. RADIOHEAD ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ (Kid A LP October 2000)
Kid A was the first Radiohead album to be influenced by Thom Yorke’s increasing fascination with avant-garde dance music, although in reality, far from being marginalised and ground breaking, the tracks themselves rarely strayed from traditional song structures. Having said that, opener ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ let you know immediately that Kid A was going to be significantly different to OK Computer. With a barrage of synth noises, no drums and Yorke’s otherworldly voice chopped up and backtracked, it captured a range of bleak, dislocated and dispossessed sounds and emotions that went far beyond normal, or at least the mainstream perception of it.
09. OUTKAST ‘Toilet Tisha’ (Stankonia LP November 2000)
My relationship with hip hop faltered in the late nineties when it was overtaken by commerce and the willingness of rappers to exploit the very worst aspects of black stereotyping to make a buck. Consequently, Stankonia was almost but not quite my last blast and like most Outkast albums provided a megaphone for Black empowerment and communal struggle. Covering everything from black music history to the pure pleasure to be found in sex, women and being a man, the albums scope and depth of vision was literally breathtaking.
10. SO SOLID CREW ‘Oh No (Sentimental Things)’ (Single A Side December 2000)
You never hear anything about them these days, but there was a time when So Solid Crew were massive. In the year 2000, most weekends I could be found driving my son and his mates to football in my trusty Astra van, sometimes with as many as six squeezed in the back. On the way they’d play all kinds of UK garage they’d taped direct from pirate radio and So Solids proto grime pop single ‘Oh No (Sentimental Things)’ together with its ultra-minimalist B side ‘Dilemma’ always featured. For the fourteen year old boys in my van, that one single turned So Solid Crew into the 21st centuries first version of the Sex Pistols, a heady mix of musical anarchy and cultural disruption I never thought I’d witness again.
2001
11. DAFT PUNK ‘Something About Us’ (Discovery LP March 2001)
If ever I needed evidence that I was starting to lag behind the times when it came to music culture, I only had to think of Daft Punk. Hailed from the start as sonic revolutionaries, try as I might I just didn’t get it. Maybe it was the cheesy eighties references? Or maybe it was that ridiculous robot effect they applied to every vocal? Whatever it was, I felt like I was being cheated until suddenly, and for no apparent reason, something clicked and I finally realised what I’d been missing. From that moment on Daft Punk were playing in my house too.
12. GORILLAZ ‘Clint Eastwood’ (Gorillaz LP March 2001)
In 2001 the last thing anyone would have expected from Damon Albarn was a collaboration with his then flatmate, Tank Girl artist Jamie Hewlett, and the start of his enormously successful alternative career as a member of an imaginary cartoon pop group. But that’s exactly what happened, Gorillaz and ‘Clint Eastwood’ in particular coolly redefining the meaning of the term musical side project with an ear worm of a chorus and Del the Funky Homosapien’s inventive rhymes.
13. THE AVALANCHES ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ (Since I Left You LP April 2001)
Famously built on 3,500 samples, Since I Left You was designed to be evocative of another time and place, although exactly when or where changed every time I heard it. With unpredictable aural delights hiding around every corner, on occasion it did sound like pop literally eating itself, but as a standalone project about the power of music it has few equals.
14. SQUAREPUSHER ‘My Red Hot Car (Girl)’ (Single A Side May 2001)
No matter how experimental or out there ‘My Red Hot Car’ appeared to be, at its core was a pop song. With a memorable hook, unforgettable lyrics (‘I’m gonna fuck you with my red hot cock’), a fairly straightforward structure and smooth, synthetic instrumentation, it laid all its cards on the table. And yet, what made ‘My Red Hot Car’ so great was how Squarepusher mastermind Tom Jenkinson balanced all those elements with a hefty chunk of sonic headfuckery to leave it pushing so close to the cutting edge that it almost tumbled over, something all electronic music of the early 21st century should have at least been attempting.
15. THE STROKES ‘Hard To Explain’ (Single A Side June 2001)
In the early noughties The Strokes were the coolest kids on the planet, albeit wealthy, privately educated, extremely privileged kids. Arriving more like a shock to the system than a group, they were determined to shake awake a youth culture grown weary of sub Oasis trad rock and the ultra-conservative Coldplay, soft rock brigade. Harking back to an era of short, sharp, sexy songs and artful New York arrogance, for a year or so The Strokes would never be less than compelling.
A ragged yet elegant wall of guitar noise, debut album Is This It’s lead single ‘Hard To Explain’ was drenched in a claustrophobic, after-hours hedonism that perfectly captured the jaded, can’t-be-arsed shrug of singer songwriter Julian Casablancas, the coolest and richest kid of them all. Reintroducing teenagers to the joy of fizzingly exciting, danceable rock’n’roll by way of their savvy rewiring of the Velvet Underground and CBGB's style decadence, The Strokes let you know in no uncertain terms that dumb fuck masculinity was out and art pop alienation, post punk style and guitars were back with a vengeance!
16. MARK LANEGAN ‘One Way Street’ (Field Songs LP June 2001)
A significant figure during the grunge era, Mark Lanegan’s gravelly voice and song writing were better suited to a series of dark solo records that became progressively more nuanced, sophisticated and roots orientated. Field Songs, his fifth, was more of the same, an album full of songs influenced more by the gritty blues, country and folk music of the thirties, forties and fifties than anything else, although the remarkable ‘One Way Street’ seemed to take great delight in sprinkling shards of contemporary, song enhancing noise over its charmingly old fashioned, shuffling instrumentation.
17. TRICKY ‘Excess’ (Blowback LP June 2001)
Tricky’s first three albums described the profound, unspeakable feelings of despair, confusion, guilt and lust I was struggling with in the mid-nineties and how I had to bury those feelings just to give myself a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. Maxinquaye, Pre-Millennium Tension and Angels With Dirty Faces were perverse, paranoid and painfully personal, but when Blowback arrived in 2001, not only was I in a relatively new found state of domestic bliss with a new love and daughter, I allowed the torrent of criticism the album received to cloud my judgement, meaning I didn’t get to hear it until I found a copy in my local Oxfam alongside Travis’s weedy The Man Who.
Widely regarded as Tricky’s radio friendly pop album and packed with pointless star guests like Flea, Anthony Kiedis, Cyndi Lauper and Alanis Morrisette, Blowback was certainly different yet musically, in much the same way as its illustrious predecessors, it mirrored what was going on in my own head; the sound of someone crawling out from under the debris of their life, away from the burden of self-seriousness and the doldrums of their existence to breathe in the clean air and find a little happiness. Pop my arse! I only wish I’d heard it sooner!
18. BJORK ‘Unison’ (Vespertine LP August 2001)
There is a perception amongst Bjork haters that her albums can be a tough listen and it’s certainly true that from the noughties on she began to slip more and more into her own unfathomable universe of experimentation. In many ways Vespertine was the last of her albums to sound in any way traditional in a pop sense. Bound by her new found domesticity and relationship with avant-garde artist Matthew Barney, its timeless beats and delicate, pristine sounds provided a welcome retreat from the chaos and craziness of the outside world.
19. ROOTS MANUVA ‘Witness (1 Hope)’ (Run Come Save Me LP August 2001)
Like many early British rappers, in his youth Rodney Smith had been influenced by soundsystem culture and the revolutionary dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson. However, it was only on his second solo album Run Come Save Me that he began to reimagine UK hip hop from the foundations up and include those influences. Built on a huge squelchy bassline and Dr Who inspired Synths, ‘Witness (1 Hope)’ was Brit hop anthem number one, a razor blade ripped cyclone of a record with a gritty narrative and enough authenticity to kick any bullshit accusations of inauthenticity into touch.
20. CUNNINLYNGUISTS ‘Mic Like A Memory’ (Will Rap For Food LP October 2001)
An album and group I’ve always taken for granted, it’s only when compiling soundtracks like this that I’m reminded of Cunninnlynguists greatness. Trawling through a long list of what I was listening to in 2001 in a laborious attempt to whittle it down to just ten songs, while the contents of N.E.R.D.’s In Search Of, Missy Elliott’s Miss E , Aesop Rock’s Labor Days and Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein all fell by the wayside, Will Rap For Food inexplicably rose like a phoenix to the top of the pile. And you know what, I can’t really explain why, other than an emotionally charged song such as ‘Mic Like A Memory’ being completely at odds with the other increasingly violent, misogynistic and materialistic American rap forms of the decade.
2002
21. BOARDS OF CANADA ‘1969’ (Geogaddi LP February 2002)
The concept of hauntology in music was an interesting one appropriated by scholarly music journalists Simon Reynolds and the late Mark Fisher. While their theorising was mostly intellectual nonsense, Boards Of Canada’s output did contain elements of their reasoning, Geogaddi in particular feeling like renewing an acquaintance with a long dead relative, the voices subtly layered on top of ‘1969’, ‘Dawn Chorus’ and other equally memorable tracks adding an unsettling quality I couldn’t quite shake off.
22. MASSIVE ATTACK FEAT. MOS DEF ‘I Against I’ (Single A Side March 2002)
A decade after the release of Blue Lines, the albums legacy of rumbling basslines, loping beats and big string arrangements could be heard on everything from chill out compilations to movie soundtracks and, God help us, the coffee table CD’s of Dido. And yet, by 2002 Massive Attack as a working entity had been reduced down to just Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja. He would go on to mastermind the disappointing 100th Window the following year but before that came ‘I Against I’, a one off, download only collaboration recorded with Mos Def for the Blade II soundtrack. Darker, heavier and sounding nothing like anything else in Massive Attack’s esteemed catalogue, nonetheless it possessed a refreshing rhythmic spring that made it essential.
23. X PRESS 2 ‘Lazy’ (Single A Side April 2002)
Folk have called me lazy my entire life so ex Talking Heads mastermind David Byrne’s transformation of London DJ trio X-Press 2’s likeable but originally unspectacular deep house ditty into one of the best singles of the early noughties was manna from heaven for me. Utilising his almost robotic albeit anxiety riddled voice to great effect, he deadpanned his way through such brilliant lines as ‘I'm lazy when I'm loving I'm lazy when I play / I'm lazy with my girlfriend a thousand times a day’, all of which helped propel it to number two. For those who had written off the UK singles chart as an irrelevance, it was a welcome reminder to expect the unexpected.
24. THE STREETS ‘Let’s Push Things Forward’ (Original Pirate Material LP May 2002)
In 2002 my youngest son was sixteen and on the verge of joining the army. Two years later he would be heading for war in Afghanistan. I’m telling you this because he was the epitome of the kind of new millennium lad Mike Skinner documented in such detail on Original Pirate Material. Just like the 24 year old Brummie, his experience of listening to UK Garage had been in friend’s cars and houses rather than getting the girl and drinking champagne on the dancefloor. And he too had been on countless adventures inspired by boredom and copious amounts of weed. A mouthy, street smart geezer who just happened to be hilariously funny, he was your typical everyday kid weaned on alcopops, PlayStation, boxing, So Solid Crew and the authority baiting Eminem. ‘Let’s Push Things Forward’ was his battle cry before he had even been into battle, the album as a whole a reminder of his pride and indomitable spirit each time I play it.
25. LCD SOUNDSYSTEM ‘Losing My Edge’ (Single A Side July 2002)
The most audacious and ridiculous debut single of the noughties, James Murphy’s rant about getting older, becoming irrelevant and passing the mantle onto the kids ‘coming up from behind’ was my most played song of the noughties by far. Freaking out about entering my forties, and completely clueless about whatever hip new trend was in at any given moment, I wasn’t just losing my edge, I’d already lost it. OK, so I still insisted on raging against the dying of the light, but in truth I already knew I was wasting my time. What’s more, as I would also discover soon enough, my forties would be a breeze compared to what came next!
26. JURGEN PAAPE ‘So Wiet Wie Noch Nie’ (So Wiet Wie Noch Nie EP July 2002)
An obscure oddity, over six minutes of heavy duty bass, the hiss of a robotic snare, soothing synths and the masterful sampling of Israeli born schlager singer Daliah Lavi’s 1971 song 'Vielleicht schon morgen', if you allowed it to, ‘So Wiet Wie Noch Nie’ was capable of transporting you to somewhere approaching nirvana.
27. BECK ‘Guess I’m Doing Fine’ (Sea Change LP September 2002)
One of Beck’s more downbeat, world weary albums, the often overlooked Sea Change remains one of his finest. Packed with twelve wondrous paeans to heartache and confusion, his father David Campbell’s mournful string arrangements and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich’s electronic trickery, it may not be his most commercial, but it’s certainly one of his most important, ‘Guess I’m Doing Fine’ a handy response to anyone who asks ‘How are you?’ but doesn’t actually give a fuck.
28. DJ SHADOW ‘Six Days’ (Single A Side October 2002)
Josh Davis had a knack for making the prospect of creating your own music with a couple of forgotten charity shop records seem like a piece of cake. On ‘Six Days’ he did it by combining vocals lifted from British psych-rockers Colonel Bagshot’s protest song ‘Six Day War’ with the music from ‘I Cry In The Morning’, a spaced-out piece of psychedelic pop by former child actor Dennis Oliveri. Simple? And yet, while he only required four minutes to cast his spell, I knew damn well that us mere mortals had neither the wit or the wisdom to do likewise!
29. EMINEM ‘Lose Yourself’ (8 Mile LP October 2002)
Ditching his establishment baiting, shock horror persona, Eminem threw himself into the almost-but-not-quite autobiographical acting role of Jimmy ‘B-Rabbit’ Smith for 8 Mile. It was easy to hear much of the rapper’s own struggle was in the film’s lead single and in many ways it was that realism and the overcoming-all-odds sentiment of ‘Lose Yourself’ that transformed it into the Rocky theme song reimagined for millennials who wanted to take on the world and win. It’s not often that a whole generation knows the words to a rap song, but ‘Lose Yourself’ was more than worthy of that honour.
30. THE ROOTS ‘The Seed 2.0’ (Phrenology LP November 2002)
In 2002 hip hop was already on the slide, mainly because the genres quality control had gone berserk. Once a font for musical ideas both wildly original and luridly commercial, it had become embroiled in a protracted bout of tail chasing with producers seemingly intent on ensuring that their every record sounded exactly the same as everyone else’s. Hearing an inventive hip hop album was becoming an extremely rare occurrence but The Roots Phrenology bucked the trend with ease.
A group of real musicians, it wasn’t that Black Thought, Questlove & Co never used samples, it’s just that they used them sparingly and when they did they were more likely to be fragments of Flying Lizards and Swing Out Sister than James Brown and Kool & The Gang, making for an unholy, unlikely alliance of ground breaking brilliance. Ironically the albums centrepiece ‘The Seed 2.0’ featured no samples at all, being an edgy and accessible take on Cody Chesnutt’s original, rapper Black Thought taking his cue from Chesnutt’s lothario vibe and expanding it to create a vivid world of sex, drugs and funky soul.
2003
31. THE KNIFE ‘Heartbeats’ (Deep Cuts LP January 2003)
It’s hard to believe now but there was a time when weirdo Swedish siblings The Knife were a relatively normal indie pop duo who didn’t wear masks, occasionally used guitars and on their second album Deep Cuts tended to play it safe, except that is for ‘Heartbeats’. Existing in the juxtaposition between the albums goofy synthesized drum rolls, chiptune synth blips and yearning vocal melodies, the song was the perfect encapsulation of tender hearted pop escapism, Karin Dreijer’s stirring delivery conjuring up visions of youthful whimsy while hinting at the terrifying, distant unknown of impending adulthood.
32. !!! ‘Me And Guiliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)’ (Single A Side May 2003)
Purchased more off the back of my love for LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Losing My Edge’ than the Manhattan/Brooklyn micro scene of abrasive post punk and the self-obliterating throb of dance music, in 2003 ‘Me And Guiliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)’ was already out of date, Rudy Guliani’s stint as New York mayor having ended in 2001. But that didn’t matter. And nor did the fact that frontman Nic Offer’s singing was a bit crap because the ridiculously named !!!’s ridiculously named song was nothing less than a nine minute, punk funk triumph of groovy bass, handclaps and ‘do do do’s.
33. KANO ‘Vice Versa (Boys Love Girls)’ (Single A Side May 2003)
34. DIZZEE RASCAL ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’ (Boy In Da Corner LP July 2003)
At the height of the economic boom of the early noughties, while futures, champagne, cocaine and bad debt swilled around Canary Wharf, the sound emanating from tower blocks barely a mile away served notice that there was more than one East London. Grime sounded as if it had crash landed in the present with no past, so when pirate radio began to spread the word, its impact on British kids like my son and his mates was literally life changing. Continuing the work started by So Solid Crew, many of them were so inspired they set up their own crews, ‘Youth making music for youth’ for the first time since punk. ‘Boys Love Girls’ and Boy In Da Corner represented the true break out moment.
35. KINGS OF LEON ‘Molly’s Chambers’ (Youth & Young Manhood LP July 2003)
You must have heard the fable of the three Followill brothers and their cousin, sons of a hell and brimstone Southern preacher man dragged around churches and tent revivals across the Deep South for most of their childhood. I should have hated everything about them, but whereas The Strokes (who they were regularly compared to) were a cleverly fabricated pack of lies, these boys were the genuine article.
Their first EP Holy Roller Novacaine was noticeably different, but it was the Youth & Young Manhood album and seeing them live at Reading Rivermead that made the whole thing click. Here were boys who not only wrote seriously deep fried songs about sex and drugs and rock’n’roll, it was spectacularly obvious that they were the living embodiment of their own subject matter. And the bassist was only sixteen for fucks sake. Oh to be a Followill in 2003.
36. THE LIBERTINES ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’ (Single A Side August 2003)
They arrived in the summer of 2002 as fully formed as they’d ever be in a haze of sweat and cheap narcotics with pasty white chests poking out of skip salvaged jackets. With their tall tales of pension drawing drummers, rent boy pasts and idealistic visions of a mythical England, if you’re under forty it’s quite possible that The Libertines changed your world. The return to clattering rock’n’roll had started with the imported Strokes, but The Libertines idealistic visions of a mythical Albion opened youthful eyes to a freewheeling, fancy free side of life most never knew existed. Almost overnight the nation was overrun by a multitude of urchin rock laureates in skinny jeans and charity shop trilby’s.
37. THE RAPTURE ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’ (Echoes LP September 2003)
Three years into the 21st century we’d already had the Kings Of Leon and The Libertines who, notwithstanding the associated hype and hullabaloo, were two of the best punk influenced outfits for many a decade. Then came The Rapture. For a lot of folk, particularly switched on indie acolytes, ‘House Of Jealous Lovers’ was inextricably linked with the previous year and a New York dance punk movement that had already been and gone indecently fast, even for an indie micro genre. I knew little about any of that but it wasn’t necessary to find pleasure in the songs pulsing bassline, fearlessly off key chorus and fabulous noise.
38. OUTKAST ‘Roses’ (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below LP September 2003)
While not the masterpiece it was once claimed to be, Big Boi and Andre 3000’s response to their diverging musical interests was to make a solo album each, then release them together as Outkast. Containing of two hours and fifteen minutes of freaky exotica when 50 Cent's predictable gangsta rhymes were considered the highpoint of mainstream hip-hop was no mean feat. In fact, while Big Boi’s Speakerboxx was easy to categorise, Andre 3000’s The Love Below barely qualified as hip hop at all. More a mash up of Prince, Sly Stone grooves and eccentric experimentation, it’s mainly remembered for ‘Hey Ya’ and the stupendous robo funk of the unshakeable earworm ‘Roses’, the duo’s only appearance together on the whole project.
39. RUFUS WAINWRIGHT ‘I Don’t Know What It Is’ (Want One LP September 2003)
What an incredibly magical medium music is, one that lets you go from the furious post punk funk of The Rapture one minute to the freakadelic hip hop soul of Outkast the next, then five minutes later to the magnificent pomp and splendour of Want One. A unique, hour long peak into Rufus Wainwright’s world of pop culture, old show tunes, classical movements, the odd Beatles coda and wistful, deeply personal lyrics, songs like ‘I Don’t Know What Is’ and ‘Oh What A World’ sound like joyful reveries existing on their own terms rather than for any greater musical purpose. And you know what, more often than not that’s enough!
40. RYAN ADAMS ‘World War 24’ (Love Is Hell Pt. 1 EP November 2003)
Self-deprecating, self-mythologizing and self-medicating, Ryan Adams has always done his best to fuck up his life and career. Once a precocious wunderkind, I think it’s safe to say that he threw away most of his immense talent in his pursuit of hardcore drugs long before he faced serious allegations of beta male misogyny that almost got him cancelled forever. I saw him in Bristol where he was the epitome of the surly out of it rocker trying to play brand new songs even his band didn’t know. Miraculously, halfway through, when the effect of whatever he was on had either kicked in or worn off, he turned into the nicest bloke you could ever wish to meet, the show culminating in a Jesus like walk through the crowd while still playing guitar before downing a pint at the bar. And all without missing a note. The following night he fell off the stage in Liverpool and broke his wrist!
2004
41. LCD SOUNDSYSTEM ‘Yeah’ (Crass Yersion)’ (Single A Side January 2004)
A drummer from New Jersey, James Murphy had dropped out of his English major at New York University before turning down the chance to write for Seinfeld and spending his twenties in a handful of long forgotten groups. It came as no surprise then that as soon as LCD Soundsystem began to form in his mind he already had a wide range of material ready to go. One of his early creations was ‘Yeah’, a seething, chaotic, post punk groove that as it gradually shifted from disco to acid house and back again could quite easily be heard as a potted history of dance music. It certainly was in our house where the ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah / Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah’ chorus became our regular response to a question, even from my wife and daughter who didn’t have a clue who James Murphy or LCD Soundsystem were!
42. MADVILLAIN ‘America’s Most Blunted’ (Madvillainy LP March 2004)
As rap continued blithely on its way with a depressing litany of production line robots spouting the same old shit, Madlib and MF Doom’s brilliant Madvillain concept of mind blowing, abstract hip hop had to be heard to be believed, it’s skittering, inventive beats, unconventional samples and wide ranging subject matter unlike any hip hop there had been before or would be again.
43. THE STREETS ‘Dry Your Eyes’ (A Grand Don’t Come For Free LP May 2004)
Heard so often coming out of my son’s bedroom that it was taken for granted, I will always associate Mike Skinner’s unapologetically male paean to breaking up with the heartache and tears of teenage lads unceremoniously dumped by their first loves.
44. MYLO ‘Destroy Rock’n’Roll’ (Destroy Rock’n’Roll LP May 2004)
Coming across like the DIY dance music equivalent of The Ramones, did Mylo, otherwise known as Myles Macinnes from Skye, really want to destroy rock’n’roll like the fundamentalist Christian preacher he so liberally sampled. It was hard to tell but would any of us really have missed Springsteen, Tina Turner, Van Halen, Huey Lewis & The News, The Cars, Bonnie Tyler, Men At Work, ZZ Top, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, Sheena Easton, Big Country, REO Speedwagon, Pat Benatar, Bananarama, John Cougar Mellencamp, U2, The Alan Parsons Project, The Thompson Twins, Missing Persons, Duran Duran, The Police, Eurythmics, Culture Club including Boy George or Band Aid? I think not.
45. THE FALL ‘Theme From Sparta FC #2’ (Single A Side June 2004)
No matter what dark corner of my mind I go poking around in these days I can no longer find the rage of youth. More than anything the world makes me feel weary and more likely to go ‘Aw fuck it’ when all I really want to do is go back to building my castle in the sand, knowing only too well that the tide of time is getting higher every year. So how did Mark E. Smith do it? How did he carry on caring enough to make a record as brilliant and rockin’ as ‘Theme From Sparta FC #2’ in his late forties?
46. JUNIOR BOYS ‘Teach Me How To Fight’ (Last Exit LP September 2004)
Junior Boys were one of the first groups of the new digital age to make their songs available to a newly emerging network of bloggers. When they finally made it out of the blogosphere a couple of years later to record their debut album, their form of eighties electro pop was bold enough to take that influence and try something different, and with the warm, deceptively friendly Last Exit and a song like ‘Teach Me How To Fight’, they succeeded beautifully.
47. ARCADE FIRE ‘Wake Up’ (Funeral LP September 2004)
I don’t listen to Arcade Fire much anymore, but in the mid-noughties they were like a breath of fresh air to an indie scene on its knees. A Canadian group of multi-instrumentalist oddballs, they were fronted by husband and wife team Win Butler, a six foot three, Texas raised, boarding school nerd and Régine Chassagne, the daughter of Haitian refugees who fled to Montreal during the dictatorship of François Duvalier. Coming on strong with their songs of hollering, stadium sweeping fervour, Funeral was incredible from beginning to end with ‘Wake Up’ its magnum opus. Overflowing with lost innocence and written to be sung back to them by an audience of thousands as if it was the last thing they would ever do, it has become Arcade Fire’s greatest anthem.
48. NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS ‘O Children’ (Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus LP September 2004)
After a relatively long absence, Nick Cave found his way back onto my CD player via the beautifully packaged Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus double album. Recorded after the departure of long term Bad Seed Blixa Bargeld and split broadly in half by Abattoir Blues snarling, apocalyptic imagery of old and the gentler The Lyre of Orpheus, the project heralded a stunning return to form. Opening with the darkly glamourous 'Get Ready For Love', the breathtaking moments continued with the big choruses and driving beats of 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World' and 'Nature Boy', the lopsided folk of 'Breathless', the wanton desire of 'Babe You Turn Me On' and finally, just when I thought I’d heard everything it had to offer, the haunting gospel of ‘O Children’ whisked me off to a place both comforting and agonisingly sad. And those were just the highlights!
49. MANIC STREET PREACHERS ‘The Love Of Richard Nixon’ (Single A Side October 2004)
‘The Love Of Richard Nixon’ is not a favourite amongst devoted Manics fans who continue to be haunted by the ghost of Richey Edwards and the spectre of The Holy Bible. But I like it’s odd, spangly electronica, the incongruous guitar solo and some of the finest words Nicky Wire has ever penned. I like it a lot.
50. M.I.A. ‘Galang’ (Single A Side November 2004)
The epitome of the punk DIY ethic almost thirty years on, despite having the advantage of a friend like Elastica’s Justine Frischmann and the use of her Roland MC-505 groovebox and four-track recorder, Maya Arulpragasam’s ‘Galang’ was a revolutionary, stripped down yet weirdly symphonic sonic powerhouse that came out of the streets of not just London, but every nationality drawn to the capital’s ‘streets paved with gold’ mythology.
Even more revolutionary than the songs construction was M.I.A.’s use of the Internet. On 9th June 2004 she uploaded ‘Galang’ to the social networking site MySpace where it became the 21st century’s first viral success. In fact, powered by a technological sea change and as addictive as hell, so successful was it that within a couple of months it had become an underground hit and M.I.A. was well on her way to global superstardom.
2005
51. LCD SOUNDSYSTEM ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’ (LCD Soundsystem LP January 2005)
It only occurred to me after the release of their self-titled debut album that LCD Soundsystem were everything I could ever ask for in a group. With a punk inspired, groove heavy sound soaked in nostalgia, melancholy and nonsensical fun, they managed to master a multitude of different styles but still create more than their fair share of timeless songs while remaining relatively anonymous. Containing such gems as ‘Tribulations’, ‘Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up’ and ‘Disco Infiltrator’, the fabulous ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’, which acted more or less as James Murphy’s mission statement, topped them all.
52. BRIGHT EYES ‘Road To Joy’ (I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning LP January 2005)
In 2005 no-one did classic Americana indie folk quite like Conor Oberst. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning was his masterpiece, or at the very least an album of importance that couldn’t be ignored, partly because it was littered with the detritus of the decade and a 24 year old’s all too human take on it, but also because of his very real sense of wishing to preach beyond the converted. In the end, by the time I had gone from the chill of ‘At the Bottom of Everything’ to the final strains of the mind shredding ‘Road To Joy’, I was thanking him not only for his romanticism and restraint, but for his excesses, his mistakes and letting us all know where he stood politically, something few musicians of the new millennium had the courage to do.
53. BECK ‘Scarecrow’ (Guero LP March 2005)
Well aware of how he could be perceived as a white dude playing non-white musical forms, on Guero Beck opted for self-satire. With a title that was Spanish slang for someone with light-skin (he didn’t go quite as far as calling himself ‘gringo’), strangely, with its groovy guitar pop, kitschy samples, junkshop electronica and lyrically oddball, cut and paste tunes like the twangy ‘Scarecrow’, the end result sounded essentially like Beck For Beginners.
54. ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS ‘Fistful Of Love’ (I Am A Bird Now LP March 2005)
A class album from a virtually unknown, UK born, American raised, cabaret artist with a voice reminiscent of Nina Simone and Billie Holliday, I Am A Bird Now was remarkable in so many ways. Featuring Antony Hegarty’s deeply personal songs about identity, gender, spirituality and mortality, and with appearances from Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright and Boy George, it managed to be both profoundly meaningful and accessible, an extremely rare skill indeed.
55. GORILLAZ ‘Feel Good Inc’ (Demon Days LP May 2005)
Amongst the dexterous conjunctions of dub, hip-hop, lo-fi indie and world music hybrid styles Damon Albarn likes to fuck around with, most of his tunes positively leak melodies. Not surprisingly ‘Feel Good Inc’ was no different, seamlessly switching between folksy indie strum and grimy bass rumble to smuggle De La Soul's head-bobbing hip-hop into the mainstream. They may seem unnecessary now, but God bless those animated apes.
56. GOLDFRAPP ‘Ride A White Horse’ (Supernature LP August 2005)
Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory’s icy glam and electronic balladry first came to my attention on the fabulous Felt Mountain at the start of the new millennium. Even better was Supernature, its title alone a nod to the late seventies Euro disco of Cerrone. Created in a Somerset cottage rather than a Berlin nightclub, the album kicked off with three glitter thumping teen disco anthems (‘Ooh La La’, ‘Lovely to See You’, ‘Ride a White Horse’) that sounded like an inspired fusion of T. Rex and Giorgio Moroder with references to every glamorous, dark, witty and twisted slice of pop over the last thirty years. It’s much to Goldfrapp’s credit that even today, sonically it sounds like the thoroughly modern triumph of electronics and decadence it was designed to be.
57. DEVENDRA BANHART ‘I Feel Just Like A Child’ (Cripple Crow LP September 2005)
I’m not sure why I had him on my mind in the mid-noughties, having barely listened to him at all since the seventies, but the ghost of Marc Bolan could also be found wandering through Texas minstrel Devendra Banhart’s Cripple Crow. Even so, unlike Goldfrapp’s Supernature, in his case it was more the exotic, sixties, freak folk of Tyrannosaurus Rex than T. Rex. Far too indebted to the spirit of Woodstock, patchouli oil drenched hippy bollocks and The Beatles (those fuckers get everywhere) for me to accept his every word, the shuffling ‘I Feel Just Like A Child’ was blessed with a truth and beauty I found impossible to ignore no matter how hard I tried.
58. CSS ‘Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above’ (Single A Side September 2005)
Originally released to little acclaim, all female Brazilian group CSS’s (Cansei de Ser Sexy or in English ‘tired of being sexy’) ‘Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above’ was a giddy slice of bouncy electro pop that instantly wormed it’s way into my increasingly cynical heart. Cheeky, self-effacing and wildly fun, there was literally nothing not to like about it, which is possibly why it would be reborn as the go to song used to promote everything from the iPod to French fashion house Chloé’s latest fragrance and most bizarrely, the first series of Gavin & Stacey.
59. THE JUAN MACLEAN ‘Give Me Every Little Thing (Cajmere Mix)’ (Give Me Every Little Thing EP October 2005)
At some point in the early noughties a disco revival began to gather momentum amongst those seeking a solution to the conflicting sensibilities of rock and dance music. Suddenly the likes of Daft Punk and groups like The Rapture, LCD Soundsystem and even Franz Ferdinand were getting the rock kids down on the floor to shake their booty. A lot of it was unoriginal, derivative, shamelessly trendy and a bit shit, but some of it, like Chicago producer and DJ Curtis Jones squelchy and spare remix of ‘Give Me Every Little Thing’, was fantastically good.
60. BABYSHAMBLES ‘Albion’ (Single A Side November 2005)
I loved pretty much everything Pete Doherty recorded in the noughties and ‘Albion’ was arguably the best of them; a rather beautiful acoustic paean to dear old Blighty (‘Gin in teacups and leaves on the lawn / Violence at bus stops and the pale thin girl with eyes forlorn’) that reached for the heights and planted a tattered Union Jack firmly on the summit.
2006
61. ARCTIC MONKEYS ‘A Certain Romance’ (Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not LP February 2006)
When The Libertines imploded The Arctic Monkeys must have surprised even themselves with the speed they filled the gaping hole. Almost immediately they were declared ‘Their generations most important band’, maybe because in essence they made stripped down punk records with every touchstone of British music covered; the Englishness of The Kinks, the melodic nous of The Beatles, the sneer of the Sex Pistols, the wit of The Smiths, the groove of the Stone Roses and the clatter of The Libertines. Not bad for a bunch of lads from Sheffield who spent their teens listening to hip hop. Where that influence really showed was in Alex Turners lyrics and frenetic delivery. Forgetting the flowery fancies conjured up by the Dickensian Doherty, his tales were of the scum-ridden streets of the 21st century as opposed to the 19th.
62. THE KNIFE ‘Marble House’ (Silent Shout LP March 2006)
The third instalment of ghost in the machine music from Swedish brother/sister duo Olof and Karin Dreijer was like an enormous kick in the head, Silent Shout’s hard edged rhythms, pitch shifting vocals and inventive electronics creating an atmosphere of encroaching dread that was so real it allowed songs such as ‘Marble House’ to thrive and batter you into submission.
63. PHOENIX ‘Consolation Prizes’ (It’s Never Been Like That LP May 2006)
In the second half of the noughties I stopped buying albums. Downloading meant why bother when I could get them for nowt. So from mid-2006 on, most of the songs and albums here were downloaded onto my iPod via illegal sites like Soulseek and LimeWire. Unencumbered by artwork, liner notes or group pics, Phoenix’s preference for precocious, West Coast, pop rock from the forgotten late seventies and early eighties made them the perfect group for the 21st century. Admittedly It’s Never Been Like That’s pinky blue romanticism was fairly lightweight, but even sceptical old me could bathe in the warm glow of fabulously catchy three minute wonders like ‘Consolation Prizes’.
64. HOT CHIP ‘The Warning’ (The Warning LP May 2006)
When Hot Chip first appeared they were viewed as five, early twenty something nerds who took their aesthetic cue from black American R&B and hip-hop and had the uncanny knack of being able to balance their catchy melodies with quirky, just off centre electronica. There was definitely something pleasing about them, their divinely daft second album The Warning packed full of resigned, world weary albeit cup-half-full, joyful songs like ‘Boy From School’, ‘Over And Over’, ‘So Glad To See You’ and ‘No Fit State’ while the title track chirpily threatened to be a little more extreme with its chorus of ‘Hot chip will break your legs / Snap off your head / Hot chip will put you down / Under the ground’.
65. CAMERA OBSCURA ‘Let’s Get Out Of This Country’ (Let’s Get Out Of This Country LP May 2006)
There’s no denying it, Let’s Get Out Of This Country signalled a return to the heady days of eighties indie pop and the jingle jangle of Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, Lloyd Cole & The Commotions and The Pastels. Not that there was anything wrong with that. As a matter of fact, in the mid-noughties a pop album high on sentimentality but low on existential angst came as a welcome slice of light relief in an increasingly terrifying and fractured world.
66. JARVIS COCKER ‘Running The World’ (Single A Side July 2006)
Twenty years after one of our greatest living Englishmen solemnly muttered ‘cunts are still running the world’ over a portentous, electronic orchestra, there are more of the fucker’s around than ever before. From Trump to Musk to Putin to Gianni Infantino to Benjamin Netanyahu to Andrew Tate, the world is full of them. And I can’t help thinking that in 2006 somehow Jarvis Cocker already knew this and on his now classic tale of fatalism and despair what he was really trying to do was warn us of our impending doom, safe in the knowledge that the nearest the plebeian masses would get to anything approaching social revolution was in a ruck at the January sales!
67. MR THING & YUNGUN ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ (Grown Man Business LP August 2006)
A highlight of UK Hip Hop if ever there was one, whenever I hear ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ I’m reminded of how Thingy’s plundered seventies soul beats like The Detroit Spinners ‘If You Can’t Be In Love’ had never been used before, and how Yungun was one of the few British MC’s to have the fire and skill to negotiate such a tricky transition between straight reminiscence and profound melancholy without falling into schmaltzy sentimentality.
68. PETER, BJORN & JOHN ‘Young Folks’ (Single A Side August 2006)
The most happy-go-lucky song of the decade, Peter, Bjorn & John’s ubiquitous ‘Young Folks’ was more about a couple of world weary strangers chatting each other up than anything else, the songs slightly out of tune whistling originally intended as a guide for other instruments to follow rather than a USP. Impossible to avoid, the songs innate ability to cross the boundaries of time and place meant that it represented many different things to many different people, in my case a reminder of a time when my daughter was still young enough to find the world a magical, endlessly fascinating place, her wonder so infectious that ultimately I got caught up in it too. Given that Peter, Bjorn & John were just trying to make a brilliant pop record that is really quite miraculous!
69. THE DIVINE COMEDY ‘A Lady Of A Certain Age’ (Single A Side November 2006)
The Divine Comedy are usually lumped in with the Britpop of the late nineties when they tasted a modicum of success, but they have never stopped releasing albums. Revolving around the kind of wry, observational humour to be found in the works of E.M. Forster, Kingsley Amis, Grahame Green and Evelyn Waugh, Neil Gannon’s songs have always existed in their own bubble and the breezy ‘A Lady Of A Certain Age’ was no different. A quietly devastating comment on womanhood, class and growing old, inspired in part by The Noel Coward Diaries and being asked to write a song for Serge Gainsbourg’s wife and muse Jane Birkin, it is one of his greatest character studies.
70. BEIRUT ‘Postcards From Italy’ (The Gulag Orkestar LP November 2006)
The regal trumpet, ukulele and shuffling percussion of the beautifully melancholic ‘Postcards From Italy’ acted as my introduction to Zach Condon’s Beirut project and his love for the sepia tinted, sonic facsimile of an imaginary Eastern Bloc. And yet in reality, despite sounding like an old Balkan humming along to Tchaikovsky, at nineteen years old he was just another kid recording alone in his Santa Fe bedroom. It’s crazy to think that if the internet had not opened up the blogosphere to every musician seeking their own post box to the world, he’d still be there and we’d all be none the wiser.
2007
71. PANDA BEAR ‘Comfy In Nautica’ (Person Pitch LP March 2007)
In 2007 Panda Bear, otherwise known as Noah Lennox, provided drums, percussion and his own multi tracked voice to the often mystifying but always innovative Animal Collective, skills many would argue he used to even greater effect on his first solo album Person Pitch. Brimming with child-like wonder and a sound that was simultaneously tribal, ecstatic and vaguely disturbing, his songs had a rare, pure hearted nobility about them that still sounds timeless, never more so than on the billowing, Brian Wilson-in-a-cathedral, vocal roundelay of ‘Comfy In Nautica’.
72. LCD SOUNDSYSTEM ‘All My Friends’ (Sound Of Silver LP March 2007)
A hugely influential album, amongst Sound Of Silver’s spine tingling punk-funk-art-techno lay some extraordinary songs including ‘North American Scum’, ‘New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’, ‘Someone Great’ and best of the lot ‘All My Friends’. Sonically irresistible with a jumbled, discordant and uncomfortable piano loop, growling bass, serrated guitar and Neu!-like synth wail, it was another of James Murphy’s heartfelt, thoroughly personal songs about the ageing process and feeling disconnected while reckoning with and missing his friends. As such it ranks second only to ‘Losing My Edge’ as the decades finest.
73. ARCADE FIRE ‘Intervention’ (Neon Bible LP March 2007)
Despite following a slightly more conventional template than their debut, Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible was shrouded in even more mystery, the group themselves choosing to opt out of their role as the saviours of indie by smothering the album in a fathomless darkness. What was so beguiling was how such a hefty dose of doom mongering, with every song never far away from a rising tide of dread nameless or otherwise, was hitched to such joyously uplifting music.
The musically breathtaking ‘Intervention’ was the greatest example of that genius. Opening with a church organ playing a momentous fanfare, the song quickly resolved into a kind of garage-rock riff before building into a glorious climax fuelled paradoxically by a withering disgust at anyone claiming to have God on their side. A thrilling enigma providing comfort through some seriously dangerous times, in a decade when everyone sounded like everybody else, Arcade Fire were one of the few still daring to innovate.
74. ARCTIC MONKEYS ‘505’ (Favourite Worst Nightmare LP April 2007)
Favourite Worst Nightmare was a long way from being one of my favourite albums of the noughties, let alone of all time, but as a song ‘505’ was different. Built on chords pinched from Ennio Morricone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, it marked a significant turning point in Alex Turner’s songwriting. Nostalgic and full of romantic yearning, its well-deserved transformation from overlooked album track to TikTok favourite in 2022 was long overdue.
75. DAN LE SAC VS SCROOBIUS PIP ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ (Single A Side April 2007)
Most folk considered ‘Thou Shalt Always Kill’ as nothing more than a hip hop styled novelty single which merely went to prove they had never bothered to listen in the first place. If they had, they would have known that in reality it was a highly intelligent deconstruction of the Ten Commandments. And with humorous, often biting lines like ‘Thou shalt not think that any male over the age of thirty that plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile’, ‘Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriend's best friend take drugs and cheat on him’, ‘Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries as to those that occur in English speaking countries’ and ‘Thou shalt think for yourselves‘, it was also a prime piece of social commentary about British culture circa 2007. Crazy Frog it definitely was not!
76. M.I.A. ‘Paper Planes’ (Kala LP August 2007)
M.I.A.’s ‘Paper Planes’ united people like few other songs of the noughties, suggesting that given the right synergy of personality, topicality, and marketing a mass audience could still gather around the unlikeliest phenomenon. Riding the wave of Barack Obama’s outsider popularity, the song felt unusually relevant for pop music in the age of Simon Cowell’s X Factor. Here was another outsider, this time a Sri Lankan Tamil raised in London who won over listeners with her global-minded beats and revolutionary chic. The penultimate track on her second album Kala, ‘Paper Planes’ and its cash registers, gunshots and skanking sample of The Clash’s ‘Straight To Hell’, went from dance underground to broader consciousness in super quick time and before the year was out was already established as a cornerstone of 21st century pop.
77. THE OSCILLATION ‘Liquid Memoryman’ (Out Of Phase LP October 2007)
One of the reasons for the decline in dance music’s ability to shock and amaze was the arrival of the super club and loathsome, dollar eyed, superstar DJ’s, a set of unfortunate, profit led circumstances which didn’t exactly make for cutting edge mavericks pushing things forward. Thinking back to the more pioneering days of rave I came across The Oscillation who evoked the same spirit, but with real drums, a hint of Pink Floyd and not being strictly danceable.
78. RADIOHEAD ‘Reckoner’ (In Rainbows LP October 2007)
In Rainbows was the first album by a major artist to be self-released, initially as a download with fans paying whatever they could afford. As a concept that approach was innovative in itself, although given Radiohead’s history, the songs themselves seemed less so. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing. While I’d long considered Thom Yorke as an ultra-serious muso hermetically sealed in his Oxfordshire mansion seeking the next cutting edge noise that might yield his group a thrilling new direction, the songs on In Rainbows represented a more intimate and stripped back and consequently more wide reaching version of Radiohead. Sure, there was the occasional foray into Aphex Twin style digi-folk on ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ or the avant-garde clatter of opener ‘15 Step’, but there was also the more immediate wonder of ‘Bodysnatchers’, ‘Nude’ and ‘All I Need’, not forgetting ‘Reckoner’ which, after repeated listen’s, revealed itself to be one of the most woozily beautiful things the group have ever recorded.
79. BURIAL ‘Endomorphin’ (Untrue LP November 2007)
When Burial first appeared in 2006 far too much was written about his infamous anonymity, his love for nineties garage and drum and bass and how he liked to test his tunes by driving around South London in the dead of night. All manner of lengthy theories and hypotheses were written linking him to hauntology, socialism and most bizarrely Joy Division and Ian Curtis, but what really mattered, namely Untrue’s unique mood of urban melancholy and a listless, vague gloom conjured at least in part from disembodied female vocal samples and old videogames, was mostly ignored.
80. MGMT ‘Kids’ (Oracular Spectacular LP December 2007)
I know very little about MGMT and have no interest in discovering more. That’s because having a couple of songs that actually mean something by any artist can be enough and the intelligent lyricism and marvellously infectious, deliberately lo-fi pop of Oracular Spectacular‘s ‘Kids’ and the equally terrific ‘Time To Pretend’ are just that.
2008
81. HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR ‘Blind’ (Single A Side March 2008)
It was always obvious that Antony Hegarty would be a fabulous disco diva and so it proved when he teamed up with Hercules & Love Affair for ‘Blind’, an epic, glitter ball illuminated hymn about love, sex, sexuality, society, hard drugs or alternatively an amazing night out and the emptiness of the following morning. In truth, the subject matter was largely irrelevant, Antony’s insistently intimate voice propelling the song far beyond mere imagery to transform it into an astonishing expression of hopeless, unrequited devotion and one of the greatest dance anthems of its time.
82. THE ADVISORY CIRCLE ‘Civil Defence Is Common Sense’ (Other Channels LP March 2008)
Carefully constructed from the bones of seventies public information films and banally beautiful electronic melodies conjuring up a quietly terrifying suburban nightmare of church coffee mornings, strangely strange children's TV and impending nuclear war, Other Channels was a subtle variation on the concept of hauntology. Weird for weirds sake or genuinely inventive, tracks like ‘Civil Defence Is Common Sense’ were a reminder of the arty, experimental soundscapes me and hundreds like me on the outer fringes of DIY culture used to knock up in the late seventies and early eighties with a Freeman’s catalogue synthesiser, a double cassette recorder and a copy of the Apocalypse Now double album soundtrack.
83. PORTISHEAD We Carry On’ (Third LP April 2008)
A new millennium comeback following a decade long gestation and an album no-one was expecting, Third was a total triumph. A harrowing, post-apocalyptic soundtrack that got under my skin and wouldn’t let me rest, even now songs like ’We Carry On’, ‘Machine Gun’ and ‘Threads’ make for uneasy listening, Beth Gibbon’s voice sounding more harrowing and hollowed out than I believed humanly possible while still breathing.
84. BON IVER ‘For Emma’ (For Emma, Forever Ago LP April 2008)
It was never a given that I would start loving the songs of a beardy, indie folk singer from Wisconsin. Certainly stranger things have happened but not many. And yet, with an album as bleak, beautiful and intimate as anything served up in the noughties, Justin Vernon managed to do just that. Prompting few comparisons, his debut was an extraordinary postcard from the edge while being holed up in a backwoods cabin for three months detailing his despair at the loss of his erstwhile love. While any fool can write and sing about loneliness, he sounded so truly alone I wondered how he made it through. I’d often dreamt about a similar period of seclusion, to escape the world for a while, but after listening to For Emma, Forever Ago I wasn’t quite so sure.
85. THESE NEW PURITANS ‘Swords Of Truth’ (Swords Of Truth EP April 2008)
A 21st century group following in the art punk tradition of The Fall from whom they took their name, These New Puritans were influenced by everything from hip hop to dubstep to glitch and experimental post punk and it showed. Swords Of Truth, a limited edition, vinyl EP of 500 copies, contained three tracks which were equally bold and unpredictable, the main version of the title track the obvious standout, its sharp beats and synthesised fanfare literally buzzing with possibility and future promise.
86. AIR FRANCE ‘Collapsing Outside Your Doorstep’ (No Way Down EP June 2008)
I began to notice quite a few beards around in the noughties which would eventually become an epidemic that is still with us. However, in 2008 excessive face hair was largely limited to those of a hippy folk persuasion. Thankfully Air France, a duo rather confusingly from Gothenburg who comprised of Joel Karlsson and Henrik Markstedt, were not in the least bit hippy so neither sported a beard. They weren’t in the least bit folky either, preferring instead to use elements of Balearic disco, chart pop and samples to create a lavish, imaginary world of their own, one best summed up by the child's voice saying ‘No better, sorta like a dream’ on the glorious, stupidly addictive ‘Collapsing At your Doorstep’.
87. SIGUR ROS ‘Ára Bátur’ (Með Suð I Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust LP June 2008)
‘Hoppipolla’ was the first song my daughter told me she liked, so in my typically over the top fashion I downloaded a couple of Sigur Rós albums for her to listen to, their inbuilt seriousness making them sound far too much like hard work for my liking. I only changed my mind when I happened to catch their Heima documentary on the TV and was mesmerised by the sheer beauty of the Icelandic landscape and the magic they weaved within it.
Wishing to understand their art more fully, I dug out Með Suð I Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust again, listened intently and found it was everything I wanted it to be. Notwithstanding the moments of unbearable desolation in Jón Birgisso’s fragile voice, it has got to be one of the most gloriously uplifting albums I’ve ever heard. Greatest of all is ‘Ára Bátur’ Sigur Rós’s most joyful song. Starting with a simple piano and voice it brings in the London Sinfonietta and London Oratory Boys Choir to add an emotional swell that really was quite breathtaking.
88. FLEET FOXES ‘White Winter Hymnal’ (Fleet Foxes LP June 2008)
As far from Sigur Rós as it was possible to get musically if not geographically, Fleet Foxes were another bunch of beardy, backwoodsy, American hipster types who epitomised everything I disliked about music, at least so I thought. And yet, despite myself, not for the first time I found it impossible to resist a song as spine tinglingly wonderful as ‘White Winter Hymnal’. Approaching the sound of heaven by virtue of its soaring choral harmonies and stirring drums, as a paean to the beauty of winter it is just about perfect.
89. ANTONY & THE JOHNSONS ‘Shake That Devil’ (Another World EP October 2008)
Four years after the release of the immaculate I Am A Bird Now one of the noughties most audacious talents released his Another World EP of five, largely low key compositions. Positioned slap bang in the middle was ‘Shake That Devil’, a song that sounded so old I had to check it was actually an Antony Hegarty original and not a cover version of some vintage show tune. Composed in two distinct parts, over the course of five minutes it metamorphosed from soul shivering spoken word piece to rollicking all out blues stomp that had Antony literally shaking the devils, dogs and pigs out of his life in an act of extraordinary exorcism for both himself and the listener.
90. LILY ALLEN ‘The Fear’ (Single A Side December 2008)
In the late noughties, for the first time since the early eighties, pop began to move away from guilty pleasure territory, aged scribes and intellectuals trampling over each other to expound its virtues. Suddenly pop was interesting and cool proving, as if any proof were needed, that the pop song is still one of the greatest inventions there is. ‘The Fear’ was a classic case in point. A withering comment on a world that is all surface, no feeling, it may have been just a pop song, but then bullets are just metal, money is just paper and religion is just old stories!
2009
91. ANIMAL COLLECTIVE ‘My Girls’ (Merriweather Post Pavilion LP January 2009)
Up until the release of their eighth album Animal Collective had always been an acquired taste. A self-confessed, deliberately difficult group, on their previous albums there seemed to be a lot more experimentation going on than pop. That only changed when they were reduced to a threesome for the first time and decided to follow the same path as Noel Lennox’s Person Pitch to finally match the glimpses of promise they’d shown but never delivered.
Essentially Merriweather Post Pavilion was the sound of Animal Collective finally nailing their colours to the mast of pop, the irrepressible ‘My Girls’ an effervescent, heartfelt and inventive tune wrapped around a plea for a quieter, simpler life. In 2009, as I began to plot my escape from the overwhelming, soul sapping tedium of the daily work grind, lyrics like ‘There isn't much that I feel I'd need / A solid soul and the blood I bleed / With a little girl and by my spouse / I only want a proper house’ felt like they were written especially for me.
92. FEVER RAY ‘Keep The Streets Empty For Me’ (Fever Ray LP January 2009)
When Karin Dreijer chose to pursue a solo career as Fever Ray it came as a surprise, particularly as she had always shunned the spotlight during her years as one half of The Knife with her brother Olof. What was even more surprising was how Fever Ray incorporated glacial paced beats, softer textures and delicate melodies that resembled an album from the weird hinterlands of eighties pop. More Peter Gabriel, Blue Nile and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming than The Knife’s harsh, electronic crash, songs like ‘Keep The Streets Empty For Me’ demonstrated an eerie, melodic gentleness that was both daring and different.
93. BAT FOR LASHES ‘Daniel’ (Single A Side January 2009)
If Karin Dreijer had a vague hint of Kate Bush about her, Bat For Lashes Natasha Khan had it in abundance. Finding the middle ground between melodramatic art rock and accessible electro pop, there was no denying the eighties influences on ‘Daniel’ but it was a long way from being a parody. Instead, through a lyrical world filled with fire, sheets of rain, midnight dashes through the dark and teary confessions uttered in a ‘goodbye bed’, it strove to encapsulate the intensity and beauty of teenage love and escapism by going back to a time when pop music could be both ubiquitous and accessible while also masking a complex study of insecurity and doubt.
94. PETER DOHERTY ‘Last Of The English Roses’ (Single A Side March 2009)
Pete Doherty was regularly portrayed as the classic, misunderstood, romantic fop clinging helplessly to a bottle, a syringe or a guitar as the crowd egged him on to self-destruction. I can’t help feeling that he disappointed a lot of folk, critics in particular, by refusing to die in the most squalid of circumstances. And yet, merely by surviving, he came to symbolise the helpless frustrations of an alienated British youth who were finding life in the 51st state of America a sad farce. Even more amazingly, after all those years of promise and possibility, our Pete finally managed to grab back his reputation and write ‘Last Of The English Roses’, a rousing sing song to be hollered in the pubs of old Arcady and unquestionably one of his finest.
95. THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART ‘Young Adult Friction’ (Single A Side March 2009)
By rights The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart should have come from some scuzzy, Glaswegian suburb rather than New York, such was their similarity to the sound of young Scotland. Occupying a similar space to Camera Obscura, the fact that they were American caused me much head scratching until I realised that actually they were rather great and there was a place for their jangly, impossibly catchy, three chord gems in every era.
96. ROYKSOPP ‘Miss It So Much’ (Junior LP March 2009)
One bonus of new millennium pop culture was that it mattered not a jot whether you were American, British, French, Icelandic, Scandinavian or outer fucking Mongolian. If you were good you were good. So no-one sniggered when Norwegian electro duo Röyksopp began to blaze a trail in the early noughties. Their first couple of albums flip-flopped between sickly sweet pop and electronic gloom but Junior solved the problem by going for the middle ground. And in its own smart, delightfully poppy way it was rather good, although I can’t help feeling that may have had more to do with their choice of guest singers than Röyksopp themselves, in particular the magnificent Swedish trio of Robyn, Karin Dreijer and Lykke Li.
97. DIRTY PROJECTORS ‘Stillness Is The Move’ (Bitte Orca LP June 2009)
‘Stillness Is The Move’ was a typical late noughties song by a bunch of Brooklyn indie kids that somehow came to mean something to me. The exact reason why escapes me but it probably had something to do with the way the singer sounded a bit like the vocal gymnastics beloved by Mariah Carey and other R&B diva’s. Then again, it could have been the way the song straddled one of those New York, post punk, dance rackets of squiggly guitar lines and jerky XTC rhythms that were so prevalent earlier in the decade. Of course, the exact reason doesn’t matter. What does matter is that ‘Stillness Is The Move’ meant something then and must mean something now otherwise it wouldn’t feature here. Oh and the massive, melodic chorus is pretty good too!
98. ATLAS SOUND FEAT. NOAH LENNOX ‘Walkabout’ (Single A Side July 2009)
99. WASHED OUT ‘Feel It All Around’ (Life Of Leisure EP August 2009)
Unfortunately there was a surfeit of distinctly underwhelming artists around in the late noughties. Thankfully Bradford Cox and Ernest Greene weren’t two of them, both doing their utmost to push the cut and paste aesthetic of The Avalanches Since I Left You to its logical conclusion. Replicating the Melbourne duo’s message of modern music’s reliance on existing forms, Cox used a sample of The Dovers 1965 B Side ‘What Am I Going To Do’ as inspiration for Atlas Sound’s ‘Walkabout’ while Greene slowed down Gary Low’s 1983 Italo disco hit ‘I Want You’ to create Washed Out’s woozy, chillwave staple ‘Feel It All Around’. Significant for being representative of a decade when it was easier to repurpose vintage records than come up with something of your own, both songs ended up doing just that by twisting slices of their original inspiration into something fluid, dreamlike and completely unique.
100. THE XX ‘Infinity’ (The XX LP August 2009)
Four twenty year old, sullen faced, South Londoners dressed in black, without even knowing it The XX represented the voice of the iPod shuffle generation who weren’t afraid of combining their own like’s and loves no matter how disparate. Whether it was gentle yearning melodies, quiet minimal beats, R&B, dubstep or sparse love songs, they had no problem creating a soundtrack to their lives don. Singers Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim added an intimate tension to Jamie XX’s sonic concoctions that was all their own. And yet, it was only when I listened to their debut again recently that I realised just how influential they have been ever since and how culturally radical their sound and politics of androgyny and inclusion once were.
