It is 50 years for the reason that launch of The Who’s Quadrophenia, revered as one among rock’s biggest idea albums, a grandiose masterpiece following the existential disaster of a Mod having a really unhealthy day in Brighton. Also celebrating its 50th anniversary is Lou Reed’s Berlin, a rock opera wherein a intercourse employee in a harmful relationship with a drug addict has her kids taken away by social companies and dies by suicide. A contemporaneous evaluation in Rolling Stone journal labelled it “a disaster” and the “last shot at a once-promising career.” Reed had the final chuckle, because the belatedly acclaimed idea album finally claimed a place in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums Ever Made.
The yr 1973 may need been peak “concept”, the yr of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (idea: the insanity of the human situation), Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans (musical interpretation of mystical Indian scriptures), Rick Wakeman’s The Six Wives of Henry the VIII (Tudor historical past as a synthesiser opera), Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play (the non secular journey of a not too long ago deceased man) and two instalments of Gong’s Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy (one thing to do with a flying teapot and the awakening of cosmic consciousness).
It was additionally the yr of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s groundbreaking double album rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, that includes Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan because the Messiah. Over within the US, teenybop pin-up band The Osmonds tried to transform followers with The Plan, a complete album dedicated to proselytising the Mormon mission. Even The Eagles have been eager to sign their seriousness by describing Desperado as an idea album about outlaws and anti-heroes.
Things can get a bit blurry defining what constitutes an idea album. At its loosest, it may be thought of a set of thematically linked songs, encompassing every part from Frank Sinatra’s 1955 lengthy participant of romantic disillusion, In the Wee Small Hours, to Dolly Parton’s new rock covers album. But for many music followers, an idea album includes a piece of carefully outlined, thematically and narratively linked songs set in an enclosed musical universe that calls for to be approached in its entirety.
Having emerged with the deepening artistry of popular culture within the Sixties (with such notable if conceptually flawed examples as The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and The Who’s Sell Out), idea albums grew to become very related to the progressive rock style, flourishing within the Nineteen Seventies. Yet even in our single-track streaming focussed period, the idea album stays a favoured format of many musicians wishing to sign inventive seriousness: Taylor Swift has described her latest world chart-topper, Midnights, as “a concept album … about what keeps you up at night.” Which, for a style filled with dystopian futures, alien invasions, messianic visitations and psychological breakdowns, is fairly tame stuff.
Here, in your delectation, is a high 10 of the craziest idea albums ever. Not (I wish to stress) essentially the best, although all are exceptional in their very own methods.
