You didn’t think I was going to leave you there with just my favourite 20 albums of the noughties, did you? Ooh no, there are loads more lists locked away in my failing memory, if I can only dig them out. So today, I turn my attention to the big screen, in the decade where [...]

Achtung Bono by Half Man Half Biscuit “Act One, Scene One – Brenda Blethyn gets shot” …in which Britain’s most consistently amusing lyricist, Nigel Blackwell, masterminds Half Man Half Biscuit’s most consistently amusing album to date. Achtung Bono was the tenth album from the band in 20 years, and it’s harder than most to select [...]

A Grand Don’t Come For Free by The Streets “I saw this thing on ITV the other week” NME 100 Greatest Albums of the Decade: No.16 Pitchfork Top 200 Albums of the Decade: No.129 Uncut 150 Albums of the Decade: No.93 When you’ve opened your account with an album which defines an era, and it’s [...]

Back To Black by Amy Winehouse “And I tread a troubled track” Times 100 Best Albums of the Decade: No.2 NME 100 Greatest Albums of the Decade: No.27 Uncut 150 Albums of the Decade: No.20 When you’ve brought out such a stunning debut record, making the Difficult Second Album even better, as well as changing [...]

Ovo by Peter Gabriel “And everything that I relied on disappeared” See? I wanted something to really represent the decade, and what could do that better than something to do with the millennium celebrations? Seriously though, if one thing was salvaged from the whole “Dome” thing (apart from learning never to put governments in charge [...]

Hopes and Fears by Keane “I’m getting old and I need something to rely on” Well, if Coldplay are distinctly uncool, I really have gone the whole way with this choice. But guess what? I don’t care. I discovered Keane’s 2004 debut album Hopes and Fears about six months after everybody else, and it’s consistently [...]

Frank by Amy Winehouse “Cos your dream in life, is to be a footballers wife” Every artist who makes it big seems to be in the middle of a tour when it happens, playing venues which are suddenly too small, to people who bought their tickets without knowing what they’d let themselves in for. That’s [...]

Original Pirate Material by The Streets “Grab something to eat: Maccy D’s or KFC” Times 100 Best Albums of the Decade: No.12 NME 100 Greatest Albums of the Decade: No.9 Guardian Albums of the Decade: No.1 Pitchfork Top 200 Albums of the Decade: No.36 Uncut 150 Albums of the Decade: No.43 There are so many [...]

Trouble Over Bridgwater by Half Man Half Biscuit “Late Lunch audience, we’ve got all your addresses!” Was there ever a finer album title in history? And Trouble Over Bridgwater, released in 2000, doesn’t disappoint on the song front either. There are as many obscure pop-cultural references per square inch as in any of the band’s [...]

Melody A.M. by Röyksopp “Yeah it’s me. I wanna give you some good frequencies” One of those records which brings back memories of a specific place and time; when we had a one-year-old and it was my turn to do the childcare, one of my favourite things to do was to take him into town [...]