Musical Musings: Top 30 Albums of the 1990s Pt 2

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Today at 3pm NZ Time

Part two of three. If you missed the first show, the short version: a fake “Rolling Stone top albums of the 90s” graphic went round on X in late August with Alice in Chains at number one, my guest Sughosh dismissed it in a word — “Meh” — and I asked for his thirty instead, chronological, one track from each. He promised his list “would summarily ignore popular culture of the time,” and the first twelve albums, from 1990 to 1992, delivered on that: not a single Seattle band in the three years grunge supposedly ran the world. This week we pick the story up in 1993 and run it through to 1996, eleven albums in two hours — and once again I’m keeping the titles to myself until we’re on air.

What I can tell you is that five of the eleven come from 1994, more than from any other year across the whole thirty, and that 1995 doesn’t appear at all — no Morning Glory, no The Bends, no Jagged Little Pill, nothing. There’s an album made in a house at Karekare with a Māori choir and Cook Islands log drummers on it, so a New Zealand-made record finally turns up on a New Zealand station. There’s one made in a twelve-foot garden shed in Swindon for less than twelve thousand pounds by a member of XTC, and another with a different member of XTC playing on it. There’s a song written down from a five-year-old’s fever talk, a story-song set in a Dundee laundry in the summer of love, a record that peaked at number 149 in America and is now in the Rolling Stone top 500, and one track that anyone who watched British telly on a Friday night in 1996 will recognise instantly. And for the first time, the critics start to catch up with him: two of this week’s albums are in Rolling Stone’s real top hundred of the decade. Tune in and let Sughosh make the case for the middle of the 90s.