Albums of the Year 1999

Here's the Best Ever Albums Top Ten for 1999.

1. Sigur Rois - Agaetis Byrjun

2. The Flaming Lips - Soft Bulletin

3. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication

4. Fishmans - 98.12.28

5. Blur - 13

6. The Disemenberment Plan - Emergency & I

7. The Magnetic Fields - 69 Songs

8. American Football - American Football

9. Built To Spill - Keep It Like a Secret

10. Wilco - Summerteeth

 A very strange list. A funny old year for music 1999. The Number One album on the Best Ever Albums chart, an odd, floaty, ambient record from an Icelandic combo, perhaps it could only happen on the cusp of a new millenium. As for my own favourite record of this year it was The Man Who by Travis. THE MAN WHAT?!! BY WHO?!? Do you want any credibility? Do you deserve any credibility? To be honest I don't really care much about either. That was the record I loved most from that year and still love most now. Possibly my least favourite Albums of the Year since I've started these lists in 1965, but definitely my favourite of 1999.

Travis were and are a pretty unremarkable Scottish band in many ways, (it seems they realised it themselves, their next album was called The Invisible Band), but they were huge in 1999. They were somewhat symptomatic of the times. It was a space between Oasis and Blur, then Radiohead and The Verve, who all had their big moments in the sun successively in the previous few years, (though Radiohead have remained both huge and hugely credible ever since and rightly so), then wandered off to do something else. This left some space, and the unlikely likes of Stereophonics and Travis hovered as possible contenders for a while before the equally unlikely Coldplay walked off with the prize as the next big thing as far as British guitar based bands were concerned. Just one year later, an extremely wet Chris Martin would walk down an extremely wet looking beach, singing the extremely wet Yellow. It was apparently what the world had been waiting for.

Travis were probably pretty wet to many ears too. They had their own Yellow in Why Does It Always Rain On Me? just as much an exercise in self-pity really, but I much preferred it to Yellow. And I much preferred The Man Who to anything by Coldplay, although their second album was decent.Travis had a good knack with classic songwriting of the traditional sense, seemed like a proper band and walked a nice line between melancholy and positivity. Listening to these songs again now, they still touch and move me.

Elsewhere, Shack put out another fine album in HMS Fable. They and Michael Head in particular, were one of the great unheralded treats of the Nineties. Blur put out another strong record in 13. I went for Red Hot Chili Peppers for the one and only time in 1999, buying a bootleg copy of  Californication while I was in Sicily with The Otherside in particular holding me under a spell for a while. I wouldn'y stand by the whole record but I would by that and Scar Tisue. Much else on the record is simply horrible. 

Talking of horrible, perhaps Eminem's Slim Shady LP was the record of the year in some ways. There seemed to be a fair bit of cynicism and misanthropy in the air at the time. But I'm not prepared to endorse cynicism and misanthropy anymore, so it gets seventh. Meanwhile, we all waited for the new millenium with a certain amount of anxiety rather than partying like it was 1999. Perhaps we were right. 9/11 after all was less than two calendar years away.

* The Sigur Rois record is certainly a rather lovely one. Other honorary mentions for Summerteeth, (I've never disliked a Wilco record without ever truly loving one, they're a byword for quiet consistency), and Mos Def's Black on Both Sides

1. Travis - The Man Who

2. Shack - HMS Fable

3. Blur - 13

4. Beth Orton - Central Reservation

5. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication

6. Underworld - Beaucoup Fish

7. Eminem - The Slim Shady LP

8. Beck - Midnite Vultures

9. Gomez - Liquid Skin

10. The Charlatans - Us And Us Only

Me? I went to Austria for three months on a teaching tour with a language school. Towards the end it felt like we were on either a tour of America as roadies with The Who or else at the Battle of Stalingrad. Hotel rooms began to get mistreated. It was a highly memorable experience anyhow. But possibly not something you should do every year.

Then at the end of the year I packed my bags and went to Catania, Sicily for a school year at another private language school. Nominally to teach but really to write my novel which I misguidedly thought the world needed. I was wrong. It wasn't that good as it turned out. But the experience I had there was one of the best of my entire life.