Greetings pop pickers!

I doubt that any of us will ever forget the dark days of the global pandemonium when we couldn’t go out at all, and then when we could go out we couldn’t go out without a signed note from our mammies. And face masks and Zoom meetings were all the rage, and in many cases those meetings are still very popular because you can pretend to like people even if you hate them because they can’t see the rude gestures you’re making underneath the table while you’re talking, and you don’t have to wear any clothes on your lower half and nobody knows that you’ve got rakia in your water jug.

During those times many schemes were hatched to beat the lockdown boredom. Buying air fryer contraptions, making bread, making babies and performing opera from balconies were high on the list of favourites for much of the population but I sought something a little more original to keep me occupied through the coughing and wheezing.  

Listening to one per day, I joined my youngest daughter Rose in ploughing through a massive internet list of the best rock albums ever made. This was a very interesting project even though not all of the entries on the list of five hundred could be classed as rock music. Country & western, rap, jazz, reggae, national anthems of the Soviet republics, etc. were all there.  

My constructive criticism of the music often amounted to a mere ‘awful’ so I would turn it off after hearing just a couple of tracks. Sometimes, if it was a particularly good one, I would already know the day’s selected album inside out so I might choose not to bother listening to it because it was too familiar to pose a challenge to my temporal lobe. Such predicaments caused me to question the viability of the list and I decided to right a few wrongs by compiling my own.

I set about this task sometime in the summer of 2022 and completed it in January 2025 whilst lying on my snot-encrusted settee with nothing better to do during a short illness (which wasn’t Covid 19). One item per day over such a long period of time would suggest a figure near to a thousand albums, but it contains only a hundred. However, every one of them is an absolute gem, which made it necessary for me to listen to some of them numerous times. And then there were some days when I was busy with other things or I just couldn’t be arsed.

It would have been easy to quickly fill up a list by selecting twenty albums by David Bowie, fifteen by the Beatles, ten by the Rolling Stones and five by Chas ‘n’ Dave but to ensure a wide spread of styles I only allowed myself one album by each artist. Other rules included no soundtracks, no live albums, no ‘best of’ albums and no classical music albums because that really deserved a whole additional list. Only albums that I really loved and that I had listened to numerous times made it on to the list so I excluded many artists that might, under different circumstances, be expected to be included on the strength of their reputation alone, such as B*Witched and Led Zeppelin.

I’m not sure if anyone will ever read this compilation, let alone go through it listening to each album listed, but it’s something I needed to do to sum up my six decades of listening to popular music. And it may not be the final cut as new music comes along and tastes change, so if I were to put it together again next week it could be quite different.

But here are my hot one hundred, listed in no particular order, for your infinite listening pleasure, and mine…

1. Lush - Lovelife
2. Planxty - Planxty
3. Lindisfarne - Nicely Out of Tune
4. Dusty Springfield - A Girl Called Dusty
5. The Damned - Machine Gun Etiquette
6. The Rolling Stones - Sticky Fingers
7. Buena Vista Social Club – Buena Vista Social Club
8. The Cardigans - Gran Tourismo
9. Billy Bragg - Brewing Up with Billy Bragg
10. Joni Mitchell - Blue
11. Garbage - Garbage
12. Dr Ross - Call the Doctor
13. Cockney Rebel - The Human Menagerie
14. Bob Dylan - Blood On the Tracks
15. David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
16. Ronnie Drew - The Humour is On Me Now
17. The Velvet Underground - Andy Warhol
18. This Mortal Coil - It'll End in Tears
19. Thin Lizzy - Black Rose
20. Billie Holiday - Lady Sings the Blues
21. Bob Seger - Night Moves
22. The Beatles - Revolver
23. The Undertones - The Undertones
24. Queen - Queen (sometimes known as Queen I)
25. The Stranglers - Raven
26. Elton John - Madman Across the Water
27. The Cure - The Head on the Door
28. The Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
29. Kate Bush - The Kick Inside
30. Frankie Miller - Once in a Blue Moon
31. The Cocteau Twins - Four Calendar Café
32. Kirsty MacColl - Tropical Brainstorm
33. Stevie Wonder - Talking Book
34. Japan - Gentlemen Take Polaroids
35. The Dubliners - A Drop of the Hard Stuff
36. UB40 - Signing Off
37. The Who - Who's Next
38. The Beat - I Just Can’t Stop It
39. Blondie - Plastic Letters
40. Goran Bregović - Champagne for Gypsies
41. The Pogues - If I Should Fall from Grace with God
42. The Human League - Dare
43. Ryuchi Sakamoto - Beauty
44. The Specials - The Specials
45. Bob Marley and the Wailers - Exodus
46. Echobelly - On
47. The Kinks - The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society
48. Siouxsie and the Banshees - Juju
49. The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Next
50. Sinéad O’Connor - The Lion and the Cobra
51. Rokia Traoré - Beautiful Africa
52. The Faces - Oh La La
53. George Harrison - All Things Must Pass
54. Joe Jackson - I'm the Man
55. Mississippi John Hurt - Today!
56. David Sylvian - Secrets of the Beehive
57. Björk - Debut
58. Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
59. De La Soul - Three Feet High and Rising
60. Fatoumata Diawara - Fatou
61. Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra - Imbarca
62. Everything but the Girl - Walking Wounded
63. The Prodigy - The Fat of the Land
64. The Cranberries - Everyone Else is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?
65. M.I.A. - Kala
66. Ian Dury and the Blockheads - New Boots and Panties
67. Sleeper - The it Girl
68. Emel Malouthi - Kelmti Horra
69. KT Tunstall - Eye to the Telescope
70. Gogol Bordello - Trans-Continental Hustle
71. Chisu - Polaris
72. Laura Mvula - Sing to the Moon
73. Electric Light Orchestra - A New World Record
74. Propaganda - Duel
75. Ash - 1977
76. T Rex - Electric Warrior
77. Dubioza Kolektiv - Happy Machine
78. Lou Reed - Transformer
79. The Clash - London Calling
80. Lúnasa - Sé
81. Stiff Little Fingers - Nobody's Heroes
82. Tamikrest - Chatwa
83. Slade - Slayed?
84. The Chieftains - The Chieftains
85. The Monochrome Set - Love Zombies
86. Kid Creole and the Coconuts - Tropical Gangsters
87. Yazoo - Upstairs at Eric’s
88. Django Reinhardt - Djangology
89. The The - Soul Mining
90. Cornershop - When I Was Born for the 7^th Time
91. Elastica - Elastica
92. La Caravane Passe - Hôtel Karavan
93. Chris Rea - Shamrock Diaries
94. The Small Faces - There Are but Four Small Faces
95. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Rattlesnakes
96. Sheila Chandra - The Zen Kiss
97. Ronnie Lane - Anymore for Anymore
98. Fine Young Cannibals - The Raw and the Cooked
99. François Hardy - Tous les Garçons et les Filles
100. The Police - Regatta de Blanc