Rock music by numbers: Kerrang!'s 100 Greatest Rock Albums Ever! feature

'I was a teenage metalhead ...'

It's almost like entering enemy territory and it's pretty discomfiting. Yeah man, I've just bought this 20-year-old copy of Kerrang! magazine (50p) because I couldn't resist the lure of the "100 Greatest Rock Albums Ever!" feature in this glossy special edition from November 2006. Hmm, what's happening to me? 

Cum on feel the noize: Peter Saville did not design this magazine cover

Lists are generally infantile and idiotic, but - ahem - I've done plenty of them myself (check out my 100 pop songs list or, even, my 200 protest songs mega-effort). Yep, infantile and idiotic they may be but they're also effective. Idly picking up this Smash Hits-style mag in a charity shop the other day, of course I had to immediately scan the list, grimly aware that I was being suckered into caring (in the slightest) whether Guns N' Roses' Appetite For Destruction was really the best rock album ever made or wondering whether Led Zeppelin might, by any chance, have made the top 100 with any of their records (there are four Led Zep LPs featured). To state the obvious, this ain't my kinda music. Guitar solos, bombast, unbuttoned shirts, satin leggings, Iron Maiden's Eddie mascot, rockin' all night long. No! No, it's not my scene but I think, in a way, it's only right to at least take a look at this stuff. When all's said and done, rock music is pretty foundational. Steve Jones was surely listening to at least a little Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin when he was learning to play guitar, just as Nirvana were obviously heavily immersed in the mood and sound of rock from the beginning. Anyway, here are a couple of things that caught my eye in Kerrang!'s rawktastic list:

*Punk - or "punk rock" as I suppose it should be called in this context - gets a significant showing. The magazine puts Never Mind The Bollocks at number seven in its list, with the Kerrang! writer Ben Myers calling it a "traditional rock record" and one to "live your life by". Also featured: the Ramones' first album (#14, "a blueprint for the future"), Black Flag's Damaged (#33, "a definitive punk record"), Killing Joke's first album (#91, "furious and dense"), Minor Threat's debut (#46, "a thrilling exercise in energy and clean living"), Big Black's Atomizer (#63, "the bleakest, nastiest racket imaginable"), Napalm Death's Scum (#43, "redefining what it meant to be heavy"), the Stooges' Fun House (#83, "punk and garage rock's bible"), plus two Clash albums: the debut (#95, which supposedly "hummed with raw punk spirit") and London Calling (#19, "aeons beyond their contemporaries"). There's also an album I didn't know: the Swedish band Refused's The Shape Of Punk To Come (#31), praised for influencing "an entire post-hardcore/emo scene". Having now checked this album out I must admit it didn't do that much for me. 

*The usual suspects are, I suppose, all here - Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Def Leppard, Queen, Van Halen, Anthrax, Slayer, Deep Purple, AC/DC, and the umlaut-friendly Motörhead and Mötley Crüe - but there's no place for the roadhouse blues-inflected rock of Status Quo (a travesty!). Nor does the heavier side of Neil Young get a showing. Also, while I don't (at all) claim to know much about it, there doesn't seem to be all that much from the so-called New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (no Saxon, Girlschool, Tank or Tygers Of Pan Tang). Plus, goth (or "goth rock") is ignored. Isn't the The Cult's Electric more of a rock album than the Clash's stylistic mix-up, London Calling?  

Er, and that's about it. No, I can't claim to have any great insights into this music, not least as I've spent most of my life ignoring it. Circa 1979-81, I hung out with a couple of teenage rock types who talked incessantly about rock music, rode (and crashed) motorbikes and went to the odd rock show. Aged 15, my first ever gig was tagging along with my rocker friends to see Thin Lizzy at a mega-concert at Bingley Hall in Staffordshire. The sight of all those older-looking grebos holding their hips, leaning over and swishing around their long hair ("headbanging") was quite something. I didn't hate it but I didn't relate to it either. The boys are back in town, but ... er, I didn't especially care. No, compared to the looseness, energy and weirdness of the burgeoning post-punk scene (from ska and poppy new wave, through to anarcho-punk, art-rock, punk-funk and C86 twee), rock seemed too ... rigid. Fixed. Frozen into fist-pumping, leering, leather-waistcoated gestures and unvaryingly loud sounds devoid of true excitement or engaging rhythm. The amp was always turned up to 11 even when it might have been good to lower the temperature and vary the approach. Another anecdote: for a few months in 1990 I shared a house with a woman in Colchester who had an entire motorcycle gang's worth of denim-wearing rock mates who'd all pile into the house after the pubs closed and proceed to play records all night. After politely chatting to them for a few minutes, I'd go to bed and then I'd be upstairs in my room listening to them argue about what to put on the record-player next. "Let's have Led Zep II again, then we can play I and III". It was rock music by numbers. 

PS: meanwhile, at the risk of being horribly reductive, I'm tempted to say that Jacket Burner's short, sharp and extremely brutal Teenage Metalhead (sort of) sums it all up.