The Long-Player (LP) came of age long before CD or MP3 had even been thought of, and before other, now-redundant formats (8-track cartridge or cassette anyone?) came and went. Before then the 7” vinyl ‘single’ was the dominant format. Popular music had to be fully expressed in under three minutes! Albums were often little more than a clutch of already-released singles plus their B-sides (remember them? No...?), often padded out with filler tracks & cover versions with little care beyond simple commercial concerns.

In the 60’s Bob Dylan extended what would be considered “a single”, with his song ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ (1965), clocking in at six minutes long. ‘Sergeant Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (1967) was the seminal psychedelic LP from the Beatles that set a new precedent, moving away from limitations of teeny-bopper audiences & the 3-minute pop record, and into the more adult-orientated format of the LP. In the future Rock bands & record producers would push the limits of what you could do within the boundaries of two sides of vinyl. The Who created the ‘rock-opera’, a collection of tracks establishing a narrative that ran throughout an entire album, ‘The Who Sell Out’ (1967) / ‘Tommy’ (1969), and Pink Floyd developed ideas from their debut ‘Piper At the Gates of Dawn’ (1967), where long instrumentals grew to become a single piece of music that took up the whole side of vinyl, (clocking in at about 20 minutes!), to the multi-million-selling concept album, ‘Dark Side of the Moon’(1973).

This expansiveness, opened up new territories of expectation for artists & audiences alike, and led to many innovative studio-based albums, a huge creative outpouring that capitalised on this new market, and certainly upped the stakes for a whole generation of music fans & musicians! As artistic statements became ever-grandiose, drugs-of-choice became heavier, record company budgets & rock-star egos grew exponentially larger, the concept-album became as fat & bloated as the ‘70’s musicians who made them!

Rock music now took itself seriously though. The LP was the preferred medium of expression and the live show was its ritual celebration. One often reflected the other. Classic albums are often close to live-performance set-lists: Great opening track, or two, followed by ‘hit-single’, or two, followed by slow-ballad, usually as closer to Side One. Side Two might set a different tone. Always close with anthemic music, leaving the fan dazed & wanting more. I can think of many albums I have where, as soon as the needle hit the run-out groove & heads toward the centre, I would immediately snatch it back, flip the vinyl over, and drop onto Track One Side One all over again!

Almost anything released by the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin follows this ‘live-show’ format. Even 80’s indie-gods The Smiths  (Meat is Murder / The Queen is Dead) up-to-& -including 90’s-sing-along Manc favourites Oasis (Definitely Maybe / What’s The Story?) used these recognised traditions in presenting their albums.

Every obsessive music-fan has a mental list of favourite LPs, a Top Ten, or Top 100 Greatest Albums of All Time Ever, and everyone’s list will be different. Great albums should do more than collect together the greatest hits of any band. Classic status LPs capture the zeitgeist, or the ‘spirit of the age’, whether it’s ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’(1963) or ‘Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols’ (1977).

Punk kicked the bloated concept-album corpse with a return to the short-sharp-shock of rock’n’roll simplicity, back to the three minute explosion of joy, the 7” vinyl single. In Punk’s wake new LPs from The Jam ‘All Mod Cons’ (1978), The Specials ‘The Specials’ and The Clash ‘London Calling’ (1979) were soundtracks to mass unemployment & the UKs’ newfound multi-culturism; Public Image Ltd Metal Box (1979) and Joy Division Closer (1980) represented new sonic terrains made up from post-punk possibilities; PiLs’ Metal Box also broke with ‘classic’ release format, an LP spread over 6 sides of 12” vinyl presented in a metal box like a cinema-film canister. Totally unnecessary, over-expensive packaging, which soon became rusted and was always difficult to open: Genius!

The 80’s brought Hip-Hop and Rave: Club culture back in force, with the guitar being supplanted by the sampler, and the LP ditched in favour of the 12” remix. Public Enemy ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back’ (1988), De La Soul ‘Three Feet High & Rising’ (1989) or Happy Mondays ‘Pills, Thrills & Bellyaches’ (1992), each perfectly caught different, contemporaneous currents of change, spirits of the Age, upon the air.

But whether cranking up D’n’B epic ‘Timeless’ Goldie (1995) or ‘Fat Of The Land’  The Prodigy (1997) before the weekend starts out, or even listening to come-down classic ‘Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld’ The Orb (1991) early hours on a Sunday morning, these examples were rare exceptions and generally dance-music gave up on the album. CDs can hold a much greater volume of music and contemporary producers favoured the seamless edit, their own LPs mimicking the DJ-mix which had replaced the ‘live-band-show’ format.

With digital downloads now available on millions of individual tracks over the internet, perhaps the concept of the album (as well as the concept-album) had now been made redundant, no longer a contemporaneous technology with today’s bedroom beat-makers.

Making an album, though, still remains a benchmark in an artists’ developing career, and a sign of musical maturity. Recent Logistics album ‘Crash Bang Wallop’ (2009) was a much stronger affair than its predecessors due to it following a less-is-more approach, very similar to the classic rock LP format. Breakage ‘Foundation’ (2010) benefitted from being restarted from scratch and the resulting tracks, collaborations with different vocalists, produced 4 outstanding club-tracks! Both LPs feel like ‘proper, grown-up’ albums and dispel the idea that electronic dance-music cannot be appreciated away from nightclubs.

  Which is a very long & winding way of approaching what has quickly become my stand-out ‘zeitgeist’ album of  last year, ‘Margins Music’ (2008) by London dub-step producers Dan ‘Dusk’ Frampton & Martin ‘Blackdown’ Clark. It is a beautifully well-crafted piece, (incorporating intercontinental sounds of immigrant London, sampling Hindi, Punjabi & Urdu voices, Roll Deep Entourage talking postcode politics, grime mc’s Trim and Durrty Goodz alongside Indian chanteuse Farrah). Grievous Angel obviously thought so as he remixed the entire album! Now don’t get me wrong, there have been other impressive dup-step debuts (Skream ‘Skream!’, Pinch ‘Underwater Dancehall’, Benga ‘Diary of an Afro-Warrior’), but this feels like a ‘proper, grown-up’ album; Unshackled from its origins; Timeless whilst almost geographically precise; Yet cinematic in scope; Inclusive and expansive simultaneously, almost like dub-step has come of age. What next? 

When I found out that Dusk+Blackdown had already assembled musicians with a view to performing ‘Margins Music’ live, that a five-date tour had been announced including a date at the ever-lovely Band On The Wall, I got unusually excited with anticipation.  Now I know some of you were jumping about in mud at Platt Fields open-air ‘Ian Brown’ concert, (I had to take a taxi to BOTW from Withington & the event was slap-bang in between!), but while you lovely young people cavorted with old-Dadchester semi-retired Scallies like me (or more likely saved your pennies for Parklife festival the day after), I spent a beautiful evening taking in the most sublime, awesome, invigorating, inspiring soundtrack and wished you all could have been there!