Sunday's child

In any record collection worth its salt there should be a range of music to suit every mood.

Things to listen to when heading out on a Saturday night, and things to listen to on your return. Albums for good times and bad. Break-up records and make-up records, music to get you in the mood, music to keep the relationship going.

Everyone should also have a Sunday morning record. Something to soothe you into the laziest day of the week. There are Steely Dan records that do the job nicely, tracks by the late Gil-Scott Heron and the very recently departed Richie Havens, and even the obvious choice of The Commodores' Easy Like Sunday Morning.

But for me, there is only one Sunday morning accompaniment: John Martyn's Solid Air, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Released in February 1973, Solid Air was Martyn's sixth album, and brought the New Malden, Surrey-born, Glasgow-raised singer-songwriter to a new level of creativity.

Today it is regarded as the ultimate chill-out album - arguably the genre's genesis - and hailed by Paul Weller, Beth Orton, Beck, The Cure's Robert Smith and many more for its woozy fusion of acoustic blues, folk, and jazz.

For the sore of head, or those in need of continued stimulation, Solid Air's title track blissfully sets the level, dreamily blending currents of warmth and cool over a spacey intro of Danny Thompson's fluid basslines, Martyn's Martin acoustic guitar and electric piano, before the singer himself semi-slurs the opening lines:

"You've been taking your time, you've been living on solid air/You've been walking the line, you've been living on solid air/Don't know what's going wrong inside/and I can tell you that it's hard to hide when you're living on solid air."

The song is is a tribute Nick Drake, Martyn's friend, whom he would later refer to as "someone who had problems in his nut", and who was, at the time causing Martyn great concern. A year later Drake would overdose on sleeping tablets.

"I loved his music," Martyn told Rock'n'Reel's Johnny Black in 2008, shortly before Martyn himself died of pneumonia complications. "[Nick] was a well-mannered, decent man, gleeful, never said a bad word about anybody," adding that the Drake's "dreadful depression" was a terrible thing to witness. "To watch him go down and you can do nothing for it. You can try but they won't have it. He's the one person I've known that's had that and it can actually kill you."

If Solid Air reflects Drake's decline, the album represented something of a zenith for Martyn, as well as the platform for his own battles. For much of his career, drugs and booze played a playful but destructive role.

In Thompson, he had a sparring partner, big brother and surrogate father rolled into one. Of all Martyn's collaborators, the bass player was his closest. Their fights were legendary (Martyn once woke up in a hotel room to discover he'd been nailed under a carpet by Thompson, who was sitting at the table above him eating breakfast).

But through the booze-drenched excess, Martyn and Thompson produced one of the most unusually symbiotic relationships ever created between two musicians.

Nowhere on Solid Air is this more evident than on Go Down Easy, which opens with one of the most beautiful opening lines ever committed to song: "You curl around me like a fern in the spring". Go Down Easy is classic chillout Martyn: his trademark vocal, acoustic guitar set to some exotic tuning, and Thompson's upright bass woven into the song's sparseness with uncanny instinct.

Some of Martyn's best live performances featured just himself and Thompson, demonstrating how much two musicians, with a single music instrument each, could fill a soundstage. A lot of this came from Martyn's experimentation with the Echoplex. This early tape-based delay device allowed him to create polyphonics from just an acoustic guitar by slapping its bottom string for rhythm while having the Echoplex repeat phrases played on the other five strings.

On Solid Air, this technique transforms bluesman Skip James' Devil Got My Woman into I'd Rather Be The Devil, whose pure blues roots are completely obscured by a studio wigout of jazz bass lines, energetic drumming from Fairport Convention's Dave Mattacks, and Martyn vibing his guitar through the rudimentary but profoundly effective box.

Solid Air isn't, however, just a splifftastic woozefest: May You Never, written as moral support for a male friend who'd found himself involved in a pub punch-up is a gently bucolic folk number, later covered by Eric Clapton on his Slowhand album.

Jellyroll Blues is just that, a sped-up traditional blues, with the bottleneck slide technique of a Beale Street busker replaced by Martyn's remarkable finger-picking style (he was - out of all other things written about him - a truly brilliant guitar player).

Over The Hill, the album's sophomore track, is a delightfully jaunty traditional number, lifted by Richard Thompson's mandolin, and expressing the joys of returning home, being inspired by Martyn seeing his house on the horizon as he neared the coast on a train journey from London to Hastings.

Over The Hill does, however, reveal some of the dark side that was emerging in Martyn's life. "Can't get enough of sweet cocaine/Get enough of Mary Jane/Going back to where I came from/Going rolling back home again/Over the hill", let slip some of the temptations Martyn was falling prey to, and how Hastings became a brittle bolthole.

Homelife was a curious muse in Martyn's career. His 'classic' period - from 1971's Bless The Weather, through Solid Air, Inside Out, Sunday's Child, One World and Grace And Danger in 1980 were strongly influenced by the ups and downs of his marriage to Beverley (the latter album his particularly raw-to-the-bone divorce album), and by his children.

Martyn was never afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve. There were times when his heart was his sleeve: "Very few people are trying to reach the heart these days," he told the NME in 1973. "I feel strongly that there's a great dearth of the heart everywhere right now."

Beverley Martyn would later say, after they'd separated, that John put so much emotion into his music that there was scant left for her. "Music, makes my heart go, makes me tick," John once said himself. "The money doesn't really matter. If it didn't come in I would still go on playing, singing away. That's me."

And thus he did. When he died in January 2009, Martyn - on a third marriage and minus his right leg (amputated below the knee following a burst cyst), just one of many afflictions he'd dealt with in his life, including being shot twice - was still writing and recording. 

His final sessions appeared posthumously as the album Heaven And Earth. The voice had slowed to a whisky-stewed soup but the spacious jazz of his hero Pharoah Sanders, which liberally found its way onto Solid Air, was still present, along with his penchant for refreshingly emotional transparency.

Solid Air was released in another extraordinary year for music. Just a month before, Pink Floyd had released Dark Side Of The Moon (recently revisited by WWDBD? in Over The Moon), and the year also gave forth The Who's Quadrophenia, Bowie's Aladdin Sane, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John, and debuts from Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells), Steely Dan (Countdown To Ecstasy) and Bruce Springsteen (Greetings From Asbury Park), and Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On.

In and amongst these behemoths of the age, Solid Air can easily be lost. John Martyn is, today, still admired by many in the know but unknown to the masses. A tragedy.

Despite outliving most people's expectations for his life expectancy - and certainly surviving long past those of immediate friends and collaborators like Drake and Free's Paul Kossoff, Martyn left behind a vast discography.

Some of it is so-so (his '80s 'electric' period went a little too far), but in classics like Solid Air, he covered - over just 35 short minutes - the most mellifluous of records. Or, to quote Beth Orton: "Solid Air is the musical equivalent of a reassuring hug." Yep, says it all.

Art For Art's Sake - a tribute to Storm Thorgerson: 1944-2013

If you were to ask me to make a list of the greatest albums of all time, I could start now and probably never finish. Magazines and radio stations regularly try to give it a go, but rarely come up with a top 10, top 100 or even top 100 that will truly cover things adequately.

You might, however, stand a chance of coming up with a decent list of the greatest albums based on their cover art.

From Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to London Calling, album covers were an integral part of the record buying experience in the pre-CD era.

With the 2013 Record Store Day taking place throughout the world tomorrow, you won't have to go far to hear old heads - like me - ruing the disappearance of gatefold sleeves, of liner notes and lyrics, and the whole tactility of buying music in a physical format.

As a schoolboy, album art meant as much to me as the music contained within. Dull geography lessons on Upper Volta would pass more meaningfully while recreating band logos in biro on the cover of an exercise book. Entire band back catalogues could be filed and discussed according to their sleeve art, while no adolescent male could resist a sneaky peak at Roxy Music's Country Life while perusing the record racks on a Saturday afternoon.

Some covers - and more pertinently, their designers - became synonymous with the impact of the album's musical content. Barney Bubbles was the creative force behind Stiff Records during the New Wave, while further back, Roger Dean's elaborate fantasyscapes will be forever associated with Yes.

But, perhaps, the most inventive and iconic cover art designer of them all was Storm Thorgerson, who died yesterday from cancer at the age of 69.

He is mostly associated with Pink Floyd, but together with Hipgnosis, the design collective he co-founded in 1968, Thorgerson was responsible for designing covers for 10CC, Muse, Led Zeppelin, Audioslave, The Cranberries, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, Ian Dury, Steve Miller and Genesis.

Growing up in Cambridge, Thorgerson was a childhood friend of eventual Floyd members Syd Barrett, Roger Waters and David Gilmour. "We first met in our early teens," Gilmour wrote yesterday on his website. "We would gather at Sheep's Green, a spot by the river in Cambridge and Storm would always be there holding forth, making the most noise, bursting with ideas and enthusiasm. Nothing has ever really changed. He has been a constant force in my life, both at work and in private, a shoulder to cry on and a great friend."

In 1968 Thorgerson and fellow Cambridge designer Aubrey Powell were asked by the Floyd to design the cover for A Saucer Full Of Secrets. It was to seal Thorgerson's association with the band forever: "The artworks that [Storm] created for Pink Floyd from 1968 to the present day have been an inseparable part of our work," Gilmour added in his online tribute.

In 1973 the band released Dark Side Of The Moon, for which Thorgerson came up with a cover design as iconic as the record itself. It's origins were pretty functional: the band's Rick Wright had suggested Thorgerson produce something simple and straightforward. The outcome is something so straightforward and simple that it has adorned T-shirts and posters for the last 40 years

"No amount of cajoling would get them to consider any other contender, nor endure further explanation of the prism, or how exactly it might look," Thorgerson has explained. "'That's it', they said in unison, we got to get back to real work, and returned forthwith to the [Abbey Road] studio upstairs."

"The refracting glass prism referred to Floyd light shows - consummate use of light in the concert setting. Its outline is triangular and triangles are symbols of ambition, and are redolent of pyramids, both cosmic and mad in equal measure, all these ideas touching on themes in the lyrics. The joining of the spectrum extending round the back cover and across the gatefold inside was seamless like the seguing tracks on the album, whilst the opening heartbeat was represented by a repeating blip in one of the colours."

Throughout Thorgerson's work, artistic influences can be easily identified, from Picasso to Magritte, but also plenty of humour. With the Floyd's Animals, Thorgerson created another icon, with a pig famously flying over Battersea Power Station.

The shot has now passed into lore thanks to the inflatable pig used for the photograph slipping its mooring and drifting off into the incoming flight path for Heathrow Airport.

As the 1970s unfolded, and conceptual cover art became increasingly intertwined with musical narrative, Hipgnosis expanded their client roster to include other bands, and notably those on the artier side of rock, like Genesis and 10CC.


The studio also picked up Black Sabbath's Technical Ecstasy, the cover of which was once described eloquently by Ozzy Osbourne as "two robots screwing on an escalator"

More often than not covers were conceptual interpretations rather than literal representations, eschewing the pop notion that albums should be adverts for the bands, featuring the members themselves.

Through Thorgerson's work with Pink Floyd, however, notable design cues emerged that would appear in his work for other acts. Anonymity played a major part. Even with albums like Floyd's Wish You Were Here, ...And Then There Were Three by Genesis, and jazz-rockers Brand-X's Moroccan Roll (my favourite album title ever), which feature photography of people, they are never in close-up. Faces are never clear and in several cases feature figures with their backs to the camera.

Distance is always significant, something Thorgerson's work shared with Floyd's Roger Waters, who became increasingly obsessed with absence and separation, culminating in the entire narrative of The Wall. Thorgerson returned to Water's feelings with the cover for Is There Anybody Out There?, the box set of the live Wall show, which simply features the four face masks worn by the fake Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason at the beginning of the ambitious show.

One dominant cue throughout Thorgerson's projects has been the prominence of flat, green grassy fields in the lower half of the cover, blue sky in the upper half, and a prominent object or objects in the immediate foreground.

Perhaps inspired by Grantchester Meadows in Cambridge (immortalised by Floyd on Ummagumma), Thorgerson returned to this device again and again, on everything from Floyd's Atom Heart Mother and The Division Bell through to Biffy Clyro's single God & Satan and Synrise by obscure Belgian electro band Goose. Along with the setting, Thorgerson's photography would often have an unreal reality about it - rich greens in the grass, bold blues in the skyscapes, and an unnerving clarity of objects in the fore.

"I listen to the music, read the lyrics, speak to the musicians as much as possible," Thorgerson has explained. "I see myself as a kind of translator, translating an audio event – the music – into a visual event – the cover. I like to explore ambiguity and contradiction, to be upsetting but gently so. I use real elements in unreal ways."

As albums have become reduced to bitstreams, and music consumption shifts from having the patience to listen to two or even four sides of vinyl to downloaded singles or Spotify mixes, Thorgerson's artistry is, sadly, diminishing. 

There are still, thankfully, champions of the art of record design, who regard the packaging and presentation of their music as more than just a marketing exercise, and who look to today's multiple formats as an opportunity for renewed design creativity. 

But with Storm Thorgerson's passing, we should mourn the death of an era when the album cover meant more than just the thing that stops your record from getting scratched.

Over the Moon

Hanging on 

in quiet desperation 

is the English way

Along with the ubiquity of fast food drive-throughs, questionable road surfaces and sparring with trucks large enough to have their own electorate, the essence of the American road trip lies in wading through the alphabet soup of radio stations that blanket the country.

As you cruise along at genteel, radar-enforced speeds, you dial through the stations like a master safe cracker, frantically trying not to get stuck on a frequency offering country music, hellfire-and-damnation religion, or whack jobs spewing forth on the right to use uranium-tipped bullets when hunting small animals.

Eventually in this megahertz miasma you will come across something as familiar as your own face, and indeed as old as your face. It will be a riff, a chorus or a solo. You have found a classic rock station.

We Brits may have developed an awkwardness towards our own musical legacy, but Americans positively embrace those who led the British invasion of the 1960s and 70s. The likes of Led Zeppelin, The Who, Cream, the Stones and even The Beatles are often considered their own, part of the fabric that built the modern American culture. It is no accident that Tony Soprano, that icon of the American dream, drove - and frequently crashed - to the sound of New York's WAXQ, being of the generation of Americans who hold due reverence for the music that defined the rock era.

In the UK, classic rock artists - while still celebrated (as we saw during last summer's Olympic entertainment) - have been consigned to darkening corners of the radio spectrum. Although Stairway To Heaven was never released as a single, the idea of playing it in daylight hours is akin to walking naked down Oxford Street playing the German national anthem on a kazoo - somewhere between unfashionable, eccentric and arrestable.

But find yourself within 100 miles of any American conurbation between sea and shining sea and you will never be more than 20 minutes away from a station playing a track from Rumours or Frampton Comes Alive. Or a track from one of the most revered albums ever made, one that continues to draw superlative regard as it enters its fifth decade, and which, this week, celebrates its 40th anniversary: Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon.

With more than 50 million copies in circulation in the world and a cover that even those who've never listened to the record will recognise, Dark Side Of The Moon was a landmark record, full of landmarks. Musically, it is the definitive Pink Floyd album (although the surviving Floyd members still dispute this - Roger Waters citing The Wall, David Gilmour favouring Wish You Were Here).

It is also as musically accessible as anything in the Floyd canon. Breathe, the album's first musical track, is seemingly built out of an extended bluesy jams that were the band's hallmark in their early days in London's underground club scene, the only notable shift being Richard Wright's Miles Davis-influenced chord changes on the piano.

In principle, however, DSOTM is a concept album, lyrically owing much to bassist and lead writer Roger Waters' perennial obsessions with distance, separation (the loss of Syd Barrett) and death (the loss of his father at Anzio during World War II), and a growing cynicism towards the modern world.

Not that Dark Side Of The Moon is so starkly contrived. Like so many albums of its time, it's as much a collection of happy accidents as a narrative of conscious statements on these topics: death is covered more or less melodically by The Great Gig In The Sky, with Clare Torry's lyric-free, lung-rattling one-take vocal (for which she received the princely fee of £30 - later successfully contested in court), built over Wright's mournful piano. Happy it may not be, but by its end, few listeners have ever been anything other than exhilarated by one of the most memorable vocal performance in music history.

Lyrically DSOTM engenders some reasonable criticism. Even Waters himself has described lines like those on Breathe as "a bit Lower Sixth" ('Breathe, breathe in the air. Don't be afraid to care. Leave, don't leave me. Look around and choose your own ground), but such lack of erudition can be easily glossed over by the mammoth impact of the album's music.

Like most episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, the social commentary of Money, is dating, especially if you regard new cars and caviar the height of extravagance. Still, as prescient as references to LearJets and buying football teams may have been, reflecting Waters' underlying socialist bent, they're hardly in the same league of rock star awkwardness as We Didn't Start The Fire or Sting singing about the plight of Russian children.

While Money afforded a generation of gauche adolescents the opportunity to let rip with the "goody-good bullshit" line, it also became the first Floyd song to be a commercial hit. One of the most unlikely aspects of this is one of the song's least obvious aspects - its obscure 7/4 time signature providing the 1-2-3-4-1-2-3 cyclical bass figure, a walking blues with its roots in Booker T & The MGs' Green Onions. And, of course, it features that looped sound effect of a cash register and the splash of coins being thrown by Waters into one of his wife's pottery creations, with the loop then spliced into seven pieces and hooked around upturned chair legs to keep with the 7/4 time.

Money isn't the album's only taste of sound effects, of course: the ticking and ringing alarm clocks of Time and the pulsing heartbeat that heralds the opening track, Speak To Me and the album's first words: "I've been mad for fucking years, absolutely years, been over the edge for yonks". This and other excerpts of spoken voice throughout the album was the result of Waters using cue cards to ask stock questions to various hangers-on around Abbey Road Studios including (but never used) Paul McCartney, road manager Peter Watts (father of actress Naomi) and the cheerful studio doorman Gerry O'Driscoll ("I'm not afraid of dying. Any time will do").

And there's the mournful Us and Them, a song loosely about depression (another Waters theme), and built on a Rick Wright composition originally written for the 1970 film Zabriskie Point by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (and featuring a brief appearance by Harrison Ford, trivia fans). In place of a traditional middle eight, it features roadie Roger 'The Hat' Manifold, airing his wisdom on a road rage perpetrator.

I mean, they're not gonna kill ya. If you give 'em a quick short, sharp, shock, they won't do it again. Dig it? I mean he got off lightly, 'cause I would've given him a thrashing - I only hit him once! It was only a difference of opinion, but really...I mean good manners don't cost nothing do they, eh?

Dark Side Of The Moon has been hailed greatly and derided selectively. To the punk movement it was a convenient target, hippies going mad amid a barrage of bloated excess and overwrought self-examination that famously remained on the Billboard Hot 100 for decades after its release. Along with Emerson & Palmer's invention of the behemoth stadium tour, DSOTM is frequently suggested as one of the seeds of punk. It isn't, and shouldn't, and in some respects Money even predicts the coke-shoveling, overblown state that rock music found itself in during the mid-1970s, giving punk a platform to rail against.

At just over 42 minutes' long - constrained, of course, by the capacity of vinyl - DSOTM is short by comparison with some of the opuses of the day. And while it may well, as Waters ascertains, been the beginning of the end for Pink Floyd (or at least the album on which the creative tensions between Waters and Gilmour began to turn more dysfunctional), it is still, 40 years on, a remarkable record.

On March 24, 1973, when Dark Side Of The Moon was released, the concept album wasn't anything new. Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper, even Who's Next had all attempted some sort of narrative, musical theatre of the mind. But unlike Waters' deliberately more theatrical effort with The Wall, DSOTM presents a more subtle collage, the central theme being modern life and how rubbish it really is.

Gloriously melancholy, in a way only an English songwriter could write. Perfect, then, for driving on American roads.

Money for nothing?

Long before iPhones, iPods and iTunes, in fact long before Apple was anything more than an esoteric computer company making niche products for creative types who drove Saab convertibles, the Compact Disc was a thing of wonder and marvel.

And its marvel was no better exemplified than by Brothers In Arms, Dire Straits' 30 million-selling behemoth.

For, I suspect, many people of a certain age, it was the first time they'd ever heard a CD, and probably the first time they'd ever held in their hands anything "digital", apart from an LED watch that turned them into TV's Six Million Dollar Man.

Today, 27 years after its launch, Brothers In Arms still represents the very newness of the format. With its slick 80s production, Mark Knopfler’s crisp Stratocaster licks, and the acerbic lines of Money For Nothing, the satirical riff on the then-new MTV (including Sting-supplied backing vocals), the album epitomised a musical era made as much behind the mixing desk as in the studio itself.

It's contribution to the success of the CD has a lot to do with the fact it was used by almost every hi-fi dealer to promote the CD's audio quality. In turn, it became a symbol of mid-80s affluence - young middle classes with their CD mini system or, for a few, players in their brand new 3-series.

So with this image of shoulder-padded yuppydom in mind, it may come as a surprise to learn that by the time Brothers In Arms came out, the Compact Disc had already been on the market for three years.

In fact, yesterday marked the 30th anniversary of the very first commercially available CD going on sale - Billy Joel's 52nd Street.

Originally released in 1978 on vinyl, and containing te hits My Life and Big Shot, the CD version was on October 1, 1982 to kick-start the format as a viable music carrier.

It was, along with others launched in the next three years, only a half-step towards the CD's pristine reputation for clinical - some might say antiseptically soul-less - audio quality. For unlike Brothers In Arms, which earned its spurs as an audiophile reference,  52nd Street had been merely transferred from original analogue tapes. The Dire Straits record, on the other hand, was one of the first albums to be recorded using digital technology.

Another surprise for some is that the CD dates back even earlier than 1982: Philips began developing the technology as far back as 1974, applying its historical expertise in the application of light to its equal skills in recording media (having introduced the Compact Cassette 20 years before).

With Sony joining Philips in the later stages of development with a crucial piece of technology, error correction, the Dutch company had a powerful ally that would see them through future launches in so-called optical disc technologies like DVD and more recently Blu-ray Disc, forming a relationship with the content world that allowed these so-called 'optical disc' formats to flourish.

30 years on, however, and the CD is already in its death throes. Having heralded the digital consumer electronics revolution - what has, in many ways, led to you and I owning all those 'i'-devices - it has also precipitated its own demise.

CD sales have continued to plummet as digital downloads have taken over. Moreover, record shops themselves have continued to shrink and evaporate, with the likes of bricks-and-mortar retailers like HMV, Tower Records and Virgin giving way to the mail order giants. According to the UK record industry trade body, the BPI, album sales in Britain alone fell by 13.8% in the first half of 2012.

While that might not be a surprise for physical formats like the CD, it is surprising that over this summer the UK album chart recorded an all-time low for all album sales, both CDs and downloads, with Rihanna selling less than 10,000 copies of Talk That Talk. It's hard to imagine that eclipsing Brothers In Arms, or Dark Side Of The Moon, Thriller or Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, which remained on the Billboard 100 well into their second decade after release.

Worldwide, the CD (and, bizarrely, vinyl) continues to dominate record sales - accounting for almost two-thirds of all music sold worldwide – but the question is for how long? 

On-demand services like Spotify are taking over, with consumer tastes eschewing the notion of sitting down and listening to an album end-to-end (with pub debates breaking out about opening and closing tracks and the running order in between) in favour of a pick’n’mix approach, watching individual tracks on YouTube for free, or pre-compiled playlists on streaming sites.

Record industry watchers have also noticed a tailing off of releases from the world’s more bankable acts. Events like the London Olympics and Live 8 may have provided a boon to marquee acts like The Who, Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Coldplay, but the sales spikes they caused pale into insignificance to the cash register action created by Live Aid.

Staged just two months after Brothers In Arms was released, the strict, 20-minute set policy imposed by Bob Geldof and his “global jukebox” was just enough to showcase the likes of Queen, U2, David Bowie, Sting and Phil Collins, who all found themselves back up the charts in the weeks afterwards. This was a golden era for the record industry, even if the quality of the times – over-produced slabs of jingle-jangly chorused guitars and the ubiquitous chime of the Yamaha DX7 keyboard – didn’t match the boffo business the albums were doing.

The issue now is that with bankable bands and artists disappearing (from that list above, only U2 and Sting are still recording) through retirement or expiry, it is unlikely that an album will ever sell in the quantities that the CD helped fuel.

When Philips, Sony and a consortium of numerous film and television companies introduced the Blu-ray Disc format in 2006, people were already calling it a format too many. The Internet was here and high quality downloads fast becoming the media format of the future. It was only a matter of time before high-definition movies and music delivered down a line or through the air would be here. And now they are.

Which means that old heads like yours truly, with their anachronistic attachment to sleeve notes, cover art, Saturday afternoons spent browsing in record shops, and living room furniture built around the accommodation of a media library, are being flung, somewhat reluctantly, into the tender mercy of zeroes and ones flying through the ether.

Now that ain't workin' that's the way you do it

Let me tell you them guys ain't dumb

And in the end...

A tweet caught my eye in the aftermath of the London Olympics closing ceremony. It raised the point: "What will organisers of events like this do a few years from now when they can't wheel out acts like The Who?".

It was an interesting question. We're all very proud of our musical heritage in Britain, but the surviving members of the 60s beat and blues movements - half of the Beatles, half of The Who, four of the original Rolling Stones, as well as the likes of The Kinks, Eric Clapton, The Animals and others - can't go on forever. Not even Keith Richards.

Still, they are around and, if The Who's performance at the Olympic Stadium was anything to go by, still a force. And Sir Paul McCartney's finale appearance at the opening ceremony may have suffered sound problems, but those who saw him on tour this summer have said that the 70-year-old gave some of his best performances as a solo act.

50 years after the Rolling Stones made their debut at London's Marquee, there is still speculation that they have one more tour in them. Not bad considering their marathon, two-year Bigger Bang Tour - the last time they were all out on the road together - ended just five years ago.

Having seen them twice at various times of that run, I can vouch that they were as impressive an actas at any time over the 30-odd years I've seen them live. Despite a dubious story in the Daily Mail a few weeks back claiming that Richards struggles to remember chords, I could imagine the Stones would still cause most other touring bands to swallow something hard and jagged with a show if they were to go out on the road again now.

But at serious risk of writing the most middle-aged words I'm ever going to come out with, it's unlikely that any of today's X Factor-generation acts will be still in the public eye, let alone performing, 50 years from now. Jessie J may have been more ubiquitous at the Olympic closing ceremony than the stadium seating, but it says something that more was written about her performance of We Will Rock You with Queen than the three songs of her own she sang.

Try as some might, there is no escaping the longevity of that brotherhood of artists who, inspired by Elvis and liberated by the ending of post-war gloom, finally, made American rock and roll, blues, soul and R&B their own and, in the process, made Britain center of the musical world for much of the 1960s.

1962, in particular, was a significant year: little more than a month after that Stones gig at the Marquee, Ringo Starr took over from Pete Best as the drummer in The Beatles. Four days later - 50 years ago tonight - they made their own debut at Liverpool's Cavern Club.

The irony is that today, August 22, represents something of a bookend for The Beatles. Because it was on this day in 1969 that the band held their very last photo session, at Tittenhurst Park, the Berkshire mansion that John Lennon and Yoko Ono had moved into just 11 days before. It's the same house in which Lennon would later record his Imagine film, which made a tearful appearance in the Olympic closing ceremony.

Roger Waters has said that Dark Side Of The Moon was the beginning of the end for Pink Floyd. Its success and critical acclaim led to the demons that increasingly beset the band as they recorded Wish You Were Here, more intensively on Animals and then their denouement with The Wall. For The Beatles, the success and acclaim of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band seemed to have the same effect.

Cracks were appearing during the 1968 sessions for the ambitious double 'White Album' (The Beatles). By the start of 1969 the cracks were becoming even more pronounced. The cheeky, yet innocent fun the Fab Four had exuded when they first broke through with Please Please Me in 1963, and then took to America at the spearhead of the British Invasion, had ebbed away.

In the January they started rehearsals for what would eventually be the Let It Be album. For a band that had given up touring in 1965, their public visibility had become limited. An idea was hatched for Michael Lindsay-Hogg - who had made early promotional films for both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones - to film the rehearsal process on a soundstage at Twickenham Film Studios.

The cavernous studio in south-west London was cold in January, and the scrutiny of a staged environment for what was supposed to be a creative process became a miserable experience for the band. "The lowest of all lows", is Harrison's later description.

So, recording of Let It Be - then to be called Get Back - moved to The Beatles' new studio at 3 Savile Row in London's West End, the headquarters of their Apple record label and entertainment empire. Unhappy with the album's recording, it and its summer release, was put on hold. At the end of the month the band took to the roof of the Apple building to stage their famous concert - the last time they'd all perform together. Even taking the time of year into account, there was little more warmth on show than had been seen at Twickenham, and certainly none of the bonhomie that had characterised the lovable mop tops' early career - which was still only a handful of years earlier.

George Martin is said to have been surprised that The Beatles wanted to record another album after  the Let It Be/Get Back disaster, but at the beginning of July 1969 they started work on what would be Abbey Road. Sessions for the album ran through to August 20 - two days before they assembled at Lennon's country pile for their final photoshoot.

The Tittenhurst gathering was the last time the four Beatles would be 'on show' together, and came just 15 years after the teenage Lennon invited McCartney to join The Quarrymen. By September, Lennon had announced he was leaving, only to be persuaded to hang on until a reworked version of Let It Be by Phil Spector could be released.

Incredibly, just seven years separate Starr's August defection, from Rory Storm & The Hurricanes to The Beatles, and this somewhat morose-looking group of hippies reluctantly posing for pictures. The sharp suits Brian Epstein had dressed them in had gone, and instead weird beards and weirder hats had taken over. But the body of work they were to leave behind could not - and is still not - to be touched.

With so many artists from that era continuing to be in business, it's easy to think what might have been, even if The Beatles had continued into the 1970s, even if John Lennon had still been shot in 1980. Lennon went on to enjoy hits, but rarely the same acclaim; McCartney has endured as a national treasure; Harrison recorded brilliant albums like All Things Must Pass, demonstrating that Something and While My Guitar Gently Weeps weren't random examples of genius; and Ringo, bless him, has continued to live the dream, underpinned by a reputation as a truly talented drummer - which is how he came to be poached from Rory Storm in the first place.

The memories, however, are of a long time ago. The Rolling Stones have kept their legacy burning bright by staying, mostly, together. Their creativity has never matched the peak of the period between Beggars Banquet and Exile On Main Street, but that's not to say Steel Wheels or Voodoo Lounge didn't have their moments. And as a touring entity, they can still justify being the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world.

The Who have maintained themselves as a creditable heritage act - with Roger Daltrey's 68-year-old lungs showing little evidence of age at the Olympic Park, as he ironically belted out the immortal words "I hope I die before I get old", while Pete Townshend windmilled furiously next to him, as if Woodstock and Live At Leeds had only taken place days previously.

McCartney's appearance on the opening night of the Olympics drew plenty of snarkiness. For some, I'm sure, the realisation that the boyish Beatle was now a 70-year-old with a questionable dye-job makes it hard to countenance that all of our rockers from the 60s and early 70s are now dealing with old age.

Why they still do it, however, shouldn't be in question. Sir Paul McCartney is one of the world's wealthiest individuals. He could have stopped making albums - stopped doing anything, for that matter - a long time ago. So why does he?

Let his onetime rival Keith Richards answer that: "People say 'why don't you give it up?', opined Richards in his acclaimed autobiography, Life. "I don't think they understand. I'm not doing it just for the money, or for you. I'm doing it for me."

And in the end, that's why they'll keep going - until they "can't no more".

The Return Of The Giant Hogweed and other tales from 1971

There are two musical misconceptions that need to be cleared up, if I may, and this is the week to do so. Firstly, that 1967 - the year of my birth - was the golden year of musical creativity, and that secondly, punk was invented specifically to kill off progressive rock.

To the first question: it's true that 1967 gave the world Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, not to mention Are You Experienced?, the seminal Velvet Underground & Nico and The Doors' eponymous debut. But it was only the year that catalysed a period of experiment and creativity that wouldn't reach its true zenith for another four years.

The second misconception is somewhat more straight-forward to address. When The Ramones set out to offer, in 1973, "some pure, stripped down, no-bullshit rock 'n' roll", it wasn't the culture of prog rock - with its tendency towards lengthy songs, complex time signatures and Tolkienesque mythology - that punk sought to banish. No, it was the bloating of rock music. This was exemplified by the bombastic incorporation of the biggest bands of the day, writhing about in cocaine excesses on the diametric opposite side of the country to where New York's CBGB club spawned deliberate revolt.

Pink Floyd were one of the many bands to draw the ire of punk's angry young men. However, it wasn't that long beforehand that they were being hailed as the vanguard of a new movement. Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, their debut album in - guess what? - 1967, was championed for its psychedelic invention fused with co-founder Syd Barrett's pastoral English sound.

The bloating of rock music, at which punk aimed its richest phlegm, was what gradually unravelled Pink Floyd, as Roger Waters' gradual alienation from his audience reached its nadir with The Wall, preceeded by an ironically punk-like spitting episode during the tour for the Animals album.

Dark Side of the Moon established Pink Floyd as global superstars in 1973. It was their Sgt. Pepper, their Joshua Tree, their Born To Run. It was also, maintains Waters, the beginning of their end. The follow-up - Wish You Were Here (re-released today as part of the band's programme of releasing newly remastered 'experience' packages from their back catalogue) focused on the themes of absence and a creeping cynicsm by Waters towards the music industry and fame.

Wish You Were Here remains today my favourite Floyd album. It is hard to truly explain why, however. Perhaps it's because it was the first Floyd album I heard, but more likely because of it marked the maturity of a band that was still trying to find its voice, despite the success of its predecessor. Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 1-5, introduced me, paradoxically, to blues guitar, thanks to David Gilmour's hypnotic two-note Stratocaster motif which unlocks the haunting 'dawn of time' chords - played on wine glasses - which open the album, and continues with the famous 'clang-clang-clang-clang' guitar riff, dripping in reverb, delay and flange.

Shine On is also famous for the story about Syd Barrett. Sacked some years before for his increasingly erratic, LSD-addled behaviour, he appeared unannounced at Abbey Road Studios during the Shine On sessions, much to the surprise of the band who had no idea who the obese figure with shaved head and shaved eyebrows was, clutching a plastic carrier bag.

Although Shine On wasn't written by Waters specifically about Barrett, his appearance brought a spooky poignancy to the song. Likewise, the album's title track, which opines of separation and alienation ("we're like two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year"). For a band supposedly on its uppers, the jadedness that Waters would take to an extreme with The Wall, was already evident with this 1975 release, and tracks like Welcome To The Machine and Have A Cigar.

The extended blues jam that fills up much of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Parts 6-9 was typical of the sort of wigouts that Floyd had been indulging in during their live concerts for many years, and first found itself on a Pink Floyd record in 1971 with Echoes, on the album Meddle, which brings me back to the original misconception I addressed in this post.

1971 was the year where 1967's fertility really bore fruit. By the end of it, record collections had been augmented by a sizeable number of albums which are now to be considered classics of the form: the Rolling Stones brought out Sticky Fingers, Bowie gave us Hunky Dory, The Doors shut theirs with LA. Woman, and George Harrison and friends provided the prototype for Live Aid and its brethren with the legendary Concert For Bangladesh. Rock and roll clearly was very alive and kicking, but it was progressive rock - with its obscure lyrics, instrumental virtuosity and intriguing sleeve art - that, through coincidence or intent, set the years musical undercurrent.

The hallmark of many of the albums that spun on turntables in 1971 was that they aimed to tell a longer story: Marvin Gaye released what is today one of the best albums ever made - and one of the shortest - What's Going On, his earnest reflection of a world in trouble, embracing in its arc social inequality, environmentalism (hardly a fashionable cause 40 years ago) and the Vietnam War. Though not apparent, Who's Next - The Who's finest moment and another 1971 release - was another concept, rescued from Pete Townshend's aborted Lifehouse project, but inventing the Internet in the process, as well as giving the world the exhilarating Baba O'Reilly and Won't Get Fooled Again.

This week marks the 40th anniversary of the release of two albums which became part of a series of events and releases which marked 1971 apart. On November 8, 1971, Led Zeppelin released their untitled fourth album, known initially as the 'Four Symbols" album (and now, simply, as IV).

Containing Stairway To Heaven, along with Rock And Roll, the Tolkien-influenced Battle of Evermore, the hippyish Going To California and an adaptation of the Delta Blues original When the Levee Breaks (with its now much-sampled drum intro), it has since become the third best-selling album of all time in the United States.

Four days later, on November 12, 1971, a very different band, but with similar literary interests, released their third album. Nursery Cryme by Genesis marked the debut of what has become regarded as the band's "classic" line-up - Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and then new recruits Phil Collins on drums and Steve Hackett on guitar.

The album has also become regarded as an exemplary addition to the prog oeuvre, opening with a tale of Victorian sexual deviancy, Musical Box, and including a mix of period whimsy and literary nods with The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, Seven Stones (which bears more than a hint of Coleridge) and the Greek mythology-founded Fountain Of Salmacis nodding more towards the classical public school education enjoyed by Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford at their alma mata, Charterhouse.

Amid the frock-coated yarns, Mellotrons and Hackett's inventive electric guitar work, Nursery Cryme gave a foretaste of the Genesis to come with For Absent Friends.

For a band which became known for its long, complex pieces, For Absent Friends is a short - just under two minutes-long - 12-string guitar-based folk song about remembrance, and is notable for marking Collins' lead vocal debut with the group.

Another short song, Harold The Barrel, nods to Pythonesque humour, recounting the story of a Bognor restaurant owner who goes on the run after serving his own toes up for tea. 24 years later, Blur entered similar territory with Ernold Same on The Great Escape, demonstrating that the art of prototypically English story-songs was alive and well.

Earlier this year Nursery Cryme was voted overwhelmingly the No.1 prog rock album of 1971 by readers of the UK's Classic Rock magazine. It shares prestigious company, including The Yes Album and the same band's Fragile, King Crimson's Islands, ELP's Pictures At An Exhibition, Meddle and Aqualung, the epic concept album by Jethro Tull.

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Aqualung is being rereleased as a newly remixed album courtesy of my recently reacquainted friend Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree.

Wilson, who has also been retouching King Crimson's back catalogue, says that the key to the purple patch that 1971 appeared to represent is that the record industry had been forced into recognising that rock music was an art form and allowed  - if it was allowed to be so. "There seems to be something leading up to 1971," Wilson told Classic Rock earlier this year, "which is when record labels started to get interested. That's usually when scenes start to die, but I think you can see 1971 as the zenith of creative expression for experimental music. The records were still very ambitious after that, but there's something about the spirit of '71 that was special and the peak of that whole thing."

Although it would be another two years before Pink Floyd would release Dark Side Of The Moon and another three before Genesis would release The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway - two of prog rock's undisputed masterpieces - the congregation of so many legendary albums of the prog rock genre in 1971 can certainly not be attributed to record company conformity.

This was the era of bands releasing albums on a six-monthly basis, touring relentlessly and building their following through hard graft and musicianship. It's unlikely that any of them would be allowed to flourish today. It took Genesis until their 1978 tour before they even broke even as a band, despite almost ten years of critical acclaim and success in Europe and in the US.

They, and all the bands around them, probably have The Beatles - more than anyone else - to thank. Sgt. Pepper had paved the way for albums to be more than just compendia of pop songs. Which, if you think about it, is an immense irony, given that the early Beatle singles averaged at around two minutes in length...