W ould I storm Area 51?” Black Francis, aka Charles Thompson IV, ponders. “Only in terms of reading about it from the safety of a fine coffee shop. I’m not going to storm anything, certainly not involving a military base…”

At 54, Thompson, the lycanthropic visionary at the heart of alt-rock legends and proto-grunge pioneers Pixies, seems an unapologetic realist. The sci-fi nut who took the alien’s eye view on “Planet of Sound” and “Motorway To Roswell” and raced to meet the mothership landing on the Vegas Strip in “The Happening” in the early Nineties has clearly matured out of his sky-watching ways. Any talk of witchcraft, reincarnation and death curses that appear on Pixies new seventh album Beneath The Eyrie he dismisses as “theatrical affectation”, the biblical bawler of classic early albums Surfer Rosa and Doolittle stepping back from his dark art.

He’s reluctant to talk politics, too. “Life is short and I need to choose my battles,” he says when I bring up Trump. “What do you want me to say? Do I really need to say the guy seems like he’s a f***in’ piece of work? What the hell can I possibly say that’s gonna illuminate anyone about anything to do with this subject?”

Well, the (seminal, Nirvana-influencing) full-length debut Surfer Rosa was full of songs in tune with Latin American culture, the very people that Potus is now demonising.

“It’s always been like that,” Thompson argues. “I’m not saying every president has done that, but there’s a president or a king or a leader somewhere in the world right now that’s demonising some other group of people that aren’t from their particular part of the map for whatever the reason, because they’re racist or xenophobic or they have some sort of political or economic agenda they’re trying to drive. That goes on every year somewhere in the world. Now there’s some guy who is the president who seems to say a lot of things via his bombastic Twitter feed, oh great, we’re already doing enough bombast on people’s Twitter feeds and social media these days, goddamn it all, now the actual president of a country is utilising it too. I suppose it would make sense that that would happen, but it is sort of like ‘oh brother, the world really is going to hell in a hand basket.’”

He’s equally pragmatic about those people who claim Pixies just aren’t Pixies without their original bassist Kim Deal, who quit the reformed band in 2013, reportedly reluctant to taint their legacy with new albums.

“I’d say if that’s how they view it, I’m perfectly OK with that,” Thompson says. “There’s lots of other records to listen to and lots of other bands to follow. They don’t need to keep following the Pixies if they think it’s dead and over without a particular member, I get it. I suppose there are bands out there that I like that maybe I liked certain versions of the band better than other versions of the band, shall we say? But there are also bands I like – for example, the band Love from the Sixties, they’ve always got the same frontman but the backing band changes. People talk about certain earlier records that they made that have the quintessential line-up, a particular guitar player or whomever, and that is ‘the good stuff’ – I would argue that that may be for you, but for me as a listener a couple of their later records are my favourite records. If they only like a certain period of the band, great, I’m glad that they like some of it, they don’t have to like it all.”

Black is back: ‘Life is short and I need to choose my battles’

Indeed, Team Kim are set to miss out big time. The Pixies of 2019 are making some of the best, most evocative music of their career, steeped in the macabre spirit of their formative records. Take Thompson’s new guitar. A jet-black, customised guitar strung with just four strings like a diabolic banjo. And there in the headstock, set in resin, a human tooth streaming roots.

“A few years ago, I had lost my very first adult tooth,” Thomspon says, intoning like a fireside storytelling reading from a book of terror tales. “A very large molar. I received the tooth from the dentist intact, with all its roots. So I went to the guitar maker and said, ‘can you build me this customised four-string guitar, let’s do it in black. But I asked him to embed the tooth in the guitar, so he floated it in resin in the headstock. So this guitar has a kind of a vibe.”

Ever since they emerged from the Boston underground in 1987 with their flamenco-infused songs of mania, melody and menace, Pixies have been masters of the malevolent “vibe”. The moniker itself was a stroke of Guillermo del Toro genius – the sweet and playful turned sordid, supernatural, sinister – and their records were steeped in art house atmospherics. The deviant sex, deformity, religion, incest and exotic travelogues of 1988’s Surfer Rosa came awash with a seamy Latin American heat-haze and a south-of-the-border lawlessness. The 1989 million-selling Doolittle was danker still, all myth and mutilation played out like the world’s most tuneful death cult. The more sci-fi albums of Pixies’ first incarnation – 1990’s Bossanova and 1991’s Trompe Le Monde – created craterous planets of sound, by turns Plan 9 From Outer Space and a Starship Troopers battle scene. Before the band imploded from in-fighting in 1992 – drummer Dave Lovering and Deal were notified that they were out of a job by fax in January 1993 – they seemed to exist in a series of colourfully creepy worlds entirely their own.

The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Show all 40 1 /40 The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), The Velvet Underground It was Andy Warhol who wanted Lou Reed and John Cale to let his beautiful new friend Nico sing with their avant-garde rock band. Truthfully, though, Victor Frankenstein himself couldn’t have sewed together a creature out of more mismatched body parts than this album. It starts with a child’s glockenspiel and ends in deafening feedback, noise, and distortion. Side one track one, “Sunday Morning”, is a wistful ballad fit for a cool European chanteuse sung by a surly Brooklynite. “Venus in Furs” is a jangling, jagged-edge drone about a sex whipping not given lightly. “I’ll Be Your Mirror” is a love song. European Son is rock’n’roll turned sonic shockwave. That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called “the future of music”. Half a century on, all you have to do is put electricity through The Velvet Underground & Nico to realise that he was right. Chris Harvey The 40 best albums to listen to before you die I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Franklin When Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he "took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself". The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand R-E-S-P-E-C-T 50 years before the #MeToo movement. Helen Brown The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Master of Puppets (1986), Metallica Despite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like “Damage Inc” and “Orion”. This album is about storytelling – the medieval-influenced guitar picks on opener “Battery” should be enough to tell you that. Although that was really the only medieval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons clichés out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. Roisin O’Connor The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Remain in Light (1980), Talking Heads “Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…” sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock. Same as it ever was. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Catch a Fire (Jamaican version) (1973), Bob Marley and the Wailers The album that carried reggae music to the four corners of the Earth and made Bob Marley an international superstar also set the political tone for many artists to follow. Marley sang of life “where the living is hardest” in “Concrete Jungle” and looked back to Jamaica’s ignoble slaving past – “No chains around my feet but I’m not free”. He packed the album with beautiful melodic numbers, such as “High Tide and Low Tide”, and rhythmic dance tracks like “Kinky Reggae”. Released outside of Jamaica by Island Records with guitar overdubs and ornamentation, the original Jamaican version is a stripped-down masterpiece. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Revolver (1966), The Beatles An unprecedented 220 hours of studio experimentation saw George Martin and The Beatles looping, speeding, slowing and spooling tapes backwards to create a terrifically trippy new sound. The mournful enigma of McCartney’s “For No One” and the psychedelia of Lennon’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “She Said, She Said” can still leave you standing hypnotised over the spinning vinyl, wondering if the music is coming out or being sucked back in. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Like a Prayer (1989), Madonna It may be the most “serious” album she’s ever made, yet Like a Prayer is still Madonna at her most accessible – pulling no punches in topics from religion to the dissolution of her marriage. In 1989, Madonna’s personal life was tabloid fodder: a tumultuous marriage to actor Sean Penn finally ended in divorce, and she was causing controversy with the “Like a Prayer” video and its burning crosses. On the gospel abandon of the title track, she takes the listener’s breath away with her sheer ambition. Where her past records had been reflections of the modern music that influenced her – Like a Prayer saw her pay homage to bands like Sly & the Family Stone, and Simon & Garfunkel. The album was also about an artist taking control over her own narrative, after releasing records that asked the audience – and the press – to like her. RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Led Zeppelin IV (1971), Led Zeppelin Millennials coming at this album can end up feeling like the guy who saw Hamlet and complained it was all quotations. Jimmy Page’s juggernaut riffs and Robert Plant’s hedonistic wails set the bench mark for all subsequent heavy, hedonistic rock. But it’s worth playing the whole thing to experience the full mystic, monolithic ritual of the thing. Stairway? Undeniable. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Best of the Shangri-Las (1996), The Shangri-Las Oh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no no, no one ever did teen heartbreak quite like the Shangri-Las. Long before the Spice Girls packaged attitude for popular consumption, songwriter Ellie Greenwich was having trouble with a group of teenagers who had grown up in a tough part of Queen’s – “with their gestures, and language, and chewing the gum and the stockings ripped up their legs”. But the Shangri-Las sang with an ardour that was so streetwise, passionate and raw that it still reaches across more than half a century without losing any of its power. "Leader of the Pack" (co-written by Greenwich) may be their best-known song, but they were never a novelty act. This compilation captures them at their early Sixties peak. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), David Bowie Flamboyance, excess, eccentricity – this is the breakthrough album that asserted Bowie as glam rock’s new icon, surpassing T Rex. He may have come to rue his Ziggy Stardust character, but with it, Bowie transcended artists seeking authenticity via more mundane means. It was his most ambitious album – musically and thematically – that, like Prince, saw him unite his greatest strengths from previous works and pull off one of the great rock and roll albums without losing his sense of humour, or the wish to continue entertaining his fans. “I’m out to bloody entertain, not just get up onstage and knock out a few songs,” he declared. “I’m the last person to pretend I’m a radio. I’d rather go out and be a colour television set.” RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Unknown Pleasures (1979), Joy Division In their brief career, ended by the suicide of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division created two candidates for the best album by anyone ever. Closer may be a final flowering, but Unknown Pleasures is more tonally consistent, utterly unlike anything before or since. The mood is an all-pervading ink-black darkness, but there is a spiritual force coming out of the grooves that is so far beyond pop or rock, it feels almost Dostoevskyan. There are classic songs – "Disorder", "She’s Lost Control" and "New Dawn Fades" – and for those who’d swap every note Eric Clapton ever played for one of Peter Hook’s basslines, the sequence at 4:20 on "I Remember Nothing" is perhaps the single most thrilling moment in the entire Joy Division catalogue. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hejira (1976), Joni Mitchell Though her 1971 album, Blue, is usually chosen for these kinds of lists, Mitchell surpassed its silvery, heartbroken folk five years later with a record that found her confidently questioning its culturally conditioned expectations of womanhood. Against an ambiguous, jazzy landscape, her deepening, difficult voice weighs romance and domesticity against the adventure of “strange pillows” and solitude. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Body Talk (2010), Robyn The answer to whether Robyn could follow up the brilliance of her self-titled 2005 album came in a burst of releases in 2010, the EPs Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt3, and this 15-track effort, essentially a compilation album. It includes different versions of some tracks, such as the non-acoustic version of “Hang With Me” (and we can argue all night about that one), but leaves well alone when it comes to the single greatest electronic dance track since “I Feel Love”, “Dancing On My Own”. Body Talk is simply jammed with great songs. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Off The Wall (1979), Michael Jackson “I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it,” wrote Jackson as he turned 21 and shook off his cute, controlled child-star imagery to release his jubilant, fourth solo album. Produced by Quincy Jones, the sophisticated disco funk nails the balance between tight, tendon-twanging grooves and liberated euphoria. Glitter ball magic. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Illmatic (1994), Nas How good can rap get? This good. There are albums where the myth can transcend the music – not on Illmatic, where Nas vaulted himself into the ranks of the greatest MCs in 1994, with an album that countless artists since have tried – and failed – to emulate. Enlisting the hottest producers around – Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, L.E.S and Large Professor – was a move that Complex blamed for “ruining hip hop”, while still praising Nas’s record, because it had a lasting impact on the use of multiple producers on rap albums. Nas used the sounds of the densely-populated New York streets he grew up on. You hear the rattle of the steel train that opens the record, along with the cassette tape hissing the verse from a teenage Nasty Nas on Main Source’s 1991 track “Live at the BBQ”: ‘When I was 12, I went to Hell for snuffing Jesus.” RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Trans-Europe Express (1977), Kraftwerk This is the album that changes everything. The synthesised sounds coming out of Kraftwerk’s Kling-Klang studios had already become pure and beautiful on 1975’s Radio-Activity, but on Trans-Europe Express, their sophistication subtly shifts all future possibilities. The familiar quality of human sweetness and melancholy in Ralf Hutter’s voice is subsumed into the machine as rhythms interlock and bloom in side two’s mini-symphony that begins with the title track. Released four months before Giorgio Moroder’s "I Feel Love", Trans-Europe Express influenced everything from hip-hop to techno. All electronic dance music starts here. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Kind of Blue (1959), Miles Davis With the sketches of melody only written down hours before recording, the world’s best-selling jazz record still feels spontaneous and unpredictable. Davis’s friend George Russell once explained that the secret of its tonal jazz was to use every note in a scale “without having to meet the deadline of a particular chord”. Kind of Blue is unrepeatably cool. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Astral Weeks (1968), Van Morrison “If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream…” To enter this musical cathedral, where folk, jazz and blue-eyed soul meet is always to feel a sense of awe. Recorded in just two eight-hour sessions, in which Morrison first played the songs to the assembled musicians then told them to do their own thing, Astral Weeks still feels as if it was made yesterday. Morrison’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics within the richness of the acoustic setting – double bass, classical guitar and flute – make this as emotionally affecting an album as any in rock and pop. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die West Side Story Soundtrack (1961) “Life is all right in America / If you're all white in America” yelp the immigrants in this passionate and political musical relocating of Romeo and Juliet to Fifites New York. Leonard Bernstein’s sophisticated score is a melting pot of pop, classical and Latin music; Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics sharp as a flick knife. An unanswered prayer for a united and forgiving USA. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Sign o' the Times (1987), Prince Sign o’ the Times is Prince’s magnum opus from a catalogue of masterworks – a double album spanning funk, rock, R&B and most essentially, soul. It is the greatest articulation of his alchemic experiments with musical fusion – the sum of several projects Prince was working on during his most creatively fruitful year. On Sign o’ the Times, the bass is king – Prince cemented his guitar god status on Purple Rain. There are tracks that drip with sex, and love songs like “Adore”, which remains one of the greatest of all time. Stitched together with the utmost care, as if he were writing a play with a beginning, a middle and an end, the album is a landmark in both pop and in art. RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Pet Sounds (1966), The Beach Boys Caught in the psychological undertow of family trauma and all those commercial surf songs, 23-year-old Brian Wilson had a panic attack and retreated to the studio to write this dreamlike series of songs whose structural tides washed them way beyond the preppy formulas of drugstore jukeboxes. Notes pinged from vibraphones and coke cans gleam in the strange, sad waves of bittersweet melody. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Ys (2006), Joanna Newsom Weave a circle round her thrice… Joanna Newsom is dismissed by some as kookily faux-naif, but her second album, before she trained out the childlike quality from her voice, may be the most enchanted record ever made. At times, she sounds other-worldly, sitting at her harp, singing to herself of sassafras and Sisyphus, but then a phrase will carry you off suddenly to the heart’s depths – “Still, my dear, I’d have walked you to the edge of the water”. Ys’s pleasures are not simple or immediate. Newsom’s unusual song structures, with their fragmented melodies, and strange and beautiful orchestral arrangements by 63-year-old Van Dyke Parks, take time to work their magic. But once you’re bewitched, Ys’s spell never wears off. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), Public Enemy Public Enemy’s second album is hip-hop’s game-changing moment, where a new musical form that arrived fully born after years of development away from meddling outsiders found its radical voice. It Takes a Nation of Millions… is still one of the most powerful, provocative albums ever made, “Here is a land that never gave a damn / About a brother like me,” raps Chuck D on “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos”. Producer Hank Shocklee creates a hard-edged sound from samples that pay homage to soul greats such as James Brown and Isaac Hayes, and Flavor Flav gives it an unmistakeable zest. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Dark Side of the Moon (1973), Pink Floyd It’s easy to knock these white, male, middle-class proggers, with their spaceship full of technology and their monolithic ambitions. But the walloping drums, operatic howls and “quiet desperation” of this concept album about the various forms of madness still resonates with the unbalanced, overwhelmed and alienated parts of us all. Play loud, alone and after dark. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Lauryn Hill Lauryn Hill raised the game for an entire genre with this immense and groundbreaking work. Flipping between two tones – sharp and cold, and sensual and smoky – the former Fugees member stepped out from rap’s misogynist status quo and drew an audience outside of hip hop thanks to her melding of soul, reggae and R&B, and the recruitment of the likes of Mary J Blige and D’Angelo. Its sonic appeal has a lot to do with the lo-fi production and warm instrumentation, often comprised of a low thrumming bass, tight snares and doo-wop harmonies. But Hill’s reggae influences are what drive the album’s spirit: preaching love and peace but also speaking out against unrighteous oppression. Even today, it’s one of the most uplifting and inspiring records around. RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), Serge Gainsbourg The great French singer-songwriter provocateur probably wouldn’t get too many takers today for a concept album about a tender love between his middle-aged self and a teenage girl he knocks off her bicycle in his Rolls-Royce. But, musically, this cult album is sublime, an extraordinary collision of funk bass, spoken-word lyrics and Jean-Claude Vannier’s heavenly string arrangements. “Ballade de Melody Nelson”, sung by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, is one of his most sublimely gorgeous songs. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In My Own Time (1971), Karen Dalton There’s nothing contrived about Karen Dalton’s ability to flip out the guts of familiar songs and give them a dry, cracked folk-blues twist. Expanding the emotional and narrative boundaries of songs like Percy Sledge’s When a Man Loves a Woman is just what she did. Why has it taken the world so long to appreciate her? HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Let England Shake (2011), PJ Harvey “Goddamn Europeans, take me back to beautiful England.” PJ Harvey may have sounded like she was channelling Boris and Nige when she made this striking album in 2015, but few Brexiteers would want to take this journey with her. Let England Shake digs deep into the soil of the land, where buried plowshares lie waiting to be beaten into swords. Death is everywhere, sometimes in its most visceral form: “I’ve seen soldiers fall like lumps of meat,” she sings on “The Words That Maketh Murder”, “Arms and legs are in the trees.” Musically, though, it’s ravishing: Harvey employs autoharp, zither, rhodes piano, xylophone and trombone to create a futuristic folk sound that’s strikingly original yet could almost be from an earlier century. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Boy in da Corner (2003), Dizzee Rascal It’s staggering to listen back to this album and remember Dizzee was just 18-years-old when he released it. Rising through the UK garage scene as a member of east London’s Roll Deep crew, the MC born Dylan Mills allegedly honed his skills in production after being excluded from every one of his classes, apart from music. If you want any sense of how ahead of the game Dizzee was, just listen to the opening track “Sittin’ Here”. While 2018 has suffered a spate of half-hearted singles playing on the listener’s sense of nostalgia for simpler times, 15 years ago Dizzee longed for the innocence of childhood because of what he was seeing in the present day: teenage pregnancies, police brutality, his friends murdered on the streets or lost to a lifestyle of crime and cash. Boy in da Corner goes heavy on cold, uncomfortably disjointed beats, synths that emulate arcade games and police sirens, and Dizzee himself delivering bars in his trademark, high-pitched squawk. RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hounds of Love (1985), Kate Bush Proof that a woman could satisfy her unique artistic vision and top the charts without kowtowing to industry expectations, Kate Bush’s self-produced masterpiece explored the extreme range of her oceanic emotions from the seclusion of a cutting-edge studio built in the garden of her 17th-century farmhouse. The human vulnerability of her voice and traditional instruments are given an electrical charge by her pioneering use of synthesisers. Thrilling and immersive. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Blue Lines (1991), Massive Attack A uniquely British take on hip hop and soul that continues to influence booming modern genres like grime and dubstep, the Bristol collective’s debut gave a cool new pulse to the nation’s grit and grey. You can smell ashtrays on greasy spoon tables in Tricky’s whisper and feel the rain on your face in Shara Nelson’s exhilarating improvisations. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Surfer Rosa (1987), Pixies It only takes 20 seconds of opening track Bone Machine to realise Pixies and producer Steve Albini have stripped down the sound of rock ’n’ roll and rebuilt it piece by piece. The angry smack of Led Zep drums, ripe bass, and sheet metal guitar straight off the Stooges’ Detroit production line are separated and recombined. Pixies’ sound is already complete before Black Francis embarks on one of his elusive pop cult narratives (“your bone’s got a little machine”). The tension between the savagery of his vocals and Kim Deal’s softer melodic tone won’t reach its perfect balance until their next album but their debut, Surfer Rosa is gigantic, and deserving of big, big love. Its “loud, quiet, loud” tectonics would prove so influential that Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain would later say he “was basically trying to rip off the Pixies”. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Talking Timbuktu (1994), Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder If you ever doubt the possibility of relaxed and respectful conversation across the world’s cultural divisions, then give yourself an hour with this astonishing collaboration between Mali’s Ali Farka Toure (who wrote all but one of the tracks) and California’s Ry Cooder (whose slide guitar travels through them like a pilgrim). Desert meets Delta Blues. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die The Great Gospel Men (1993), Various artists Compared to the blues, the incalculable influence of gospel music on pop, soul and rock ’n’ roll has been underplayed. It can be found in every song on this brilliant 27-track compilation. If you can’t hear James Brown in the foot-stomping opener “Move on Up a Little Higher” by Brother Joe May, you’re not listening hard enough. The road to Motown from “Lord, Lord, Lord” by Professor Alex Bradford is narrow indeed, but you could still take a side-turning and follow his ecstatic whoops straight to Little Richard, who borrowed them, and on to the Beatles who copied them from him. The swooping chord changes in James Cleveland’s “My Soul Looks Back” are magnificent. All the irreplaceable soul voices, from Aretha Franklin to Bobby Womack, were steeped in gospel. This is a great place to hear where they came from. Companion album The Great Gospel Women is a marvel, too. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Hopelessness (2016), Anonhi “A lot of the music scene is just a wanking, self-congratulatory boys club,” said this angel-voiced, transgender artist in 2012. Four years later, the seismic drums and radical ecofeminist agenda of Hopelessness shook that club’s crumbling foundations to dust. The horrors of drone warfare, paedophilia and global warming are held up to the bright lights in disconcertingly beautiful rage. HB The 40 best albums to listen to before you die In Utero (1993), Nirvana Kurt Cobain had one goal with In Utero: to pull Nirvana away from what he dubbed the “candy-ass” sound on Nevermind – the album that had turned them into one of the biggest rock bands on the planet – and take them back to punk-rock. He asked Pixies’ producer Steve Albini to oversee production. It didn’t exactly eschew commercial success upon release (it went on to sell 15m copies worldwide), but the heaviness the band felt as they recorded it bears down on the listener from the opening track. Disheartened by the media obsession with his personal life and the fans clamouring for the same old shit, In Utero is pure, undiluted rage. “GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYY” he screams on “Scentless Apprentice”, capturing the essence of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume: Story of a Murderer and using it as a metaphor for his disgust at the music industry, and the press. RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Curtis (1971), Curtis Mayfield Curtis Mayfield had been spinning golden soul music from doo-wop roots with The Impressions for more than a decade before releasing his first solo album, which contains some of his greatest songs. While some point to the 1972 Blaxploitation soundtrack Superfly as the definitive Mayfield album, Curtis is deeper and more joyous, its complex arrangements masterly. Mayfield’s sweet falsetto sings of Nixon’s bland reassurances over the fuzz-bass of “(Don’t Worry) If There Is a Hell Below We’re All Going to Go”; doleful horns give the politically conscious “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” a profound emotional undertow; “Move On Up” is simply one of the most exhilarating songs in pop. To spend time with Curtis is to be in the presence of a beautiful soul. CH The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Rumours (1977), Fleetwood Mac Before they went their own way, Fleetwood Mac decided to tell a story that would be the quintessential marker for American rock culture in the Seventies. As Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks tossed the charred remains of their relationship at one another on “Dreams” and “Go Your Own Way”, the rest of the band conjured up the warm West Coast harmonies, the laid back California vibes of the rhythm section and the clear highs on “Gold Dust Woman”, in such a way that Rumours would become the definitive sound of the era. At the time of its release, it was the fastest-selling LP of all time; its success turned Fleetwood Mac into a cultural phenomenon. RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die Are You Experienced? (1967), Jimi Hendrix A virtual unknown to rock fans just a year before – Hendrix used Are You Experienced? to assert himself as a guitar genius who could combine pop, blues, rock, R&B, funk and psychedelia in a way no other artist had before. That’s even without the essential contributions of drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, who handed Are You Experienced? the rhythmic bridge between jazz and rock. Few album openers are as exquisite as “Purple Haze”. Few tracks are as gratifying, as sexy, as the strut on “Foxy Lady”. And few songs come close to the existential bliss caused by “The Wind Cries Mary”. Hendrix’s attack on the guitar contrasted against the more polished virtuosos in rock at the time – yet it is his raw ferocity that we find ourselves coming back to. Few debuts have changed the course of rock music as Hendrix did with his. RO The 40 best albums to listen to before you die We Are Family (1979), Sister Sledge Disco’s crowning glory is this album that Chic’s Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards made with Kathy Sledge and her sisters Debbie, Joni and Kim. Nile and ’Nard were at the peak of their powers, classic songs were pouring out of them – We Are Family was released in the same year as the epochal “Good Times” by Chic – and this album has four of them, “Lost in Music”, “He’s the Greatest Dancer”, “Thinking of You” and the title track itself. Sister Sledge gave Rodgers a chance to work with warmer, gutsier vocals than the cool voices he used to give Chic records such laid-back style and the result is a floor-filling dance party, punctuated by mellow ballads. CH

Two fantastic comeback albums consolidated their 2004 reunion, imagining what sort of band they’d be after a couple of decades stranded on the “Planet of Sound” for 2014’s wonderfully erratic Indie Cindy and then reconnecting with their grimy punk roots on Head Carrier in 2016. But it’s only now that the reunited Pixies have once more submerged themselves in a “vibe”. With half an album written in rehearsals near Charles’ home in Massachusetts and, as usual, no plan, they holed up in Dreamland Recording Studios, a converted church deep in the woods of upstate New York, there to commune with ancient American spirits.

“We were there in the winter before Christmas,” Thompson says. “Woodstock is a very moody place in the winter, it’s very spooky, the studio we recorded at was an old church with a one-armed cross missing all the other limbs and lots of animals scurrying around in the walls of all the buildings.”

“It was like ‘the Pixies are out in Woodstock making a record in this church and they live in this cabin, broo-ha-ha!’” adds bassist Paz Lenchantin.

Sounds like there might’ve been some Blair Witch moments during recording.

“No, not at all,” says Thompson. “It should’ve been really spooky because every single element of the studio was totally Headless Horseman, Ichabod Crane.”

“Right in back of the church in the woods there was an old train track from the 1800s that was all grown in,” recalls Lovering. “When you walk to the train track you can get a glint of a giant eagle’s nest, a bald eagle’s nest. It’s huge, quite a sight.”

The nest gave Pixies’ seventh album its title and the studio environs gave it its vibe: American gothic. “When I arrived there for the session that was the vibe that we talked about, gothic,” Thompson explains. “So whatever suggested that in the songwriting, we totally let it hang out. ‘Make a record, and your improv word of the record is gothic, go!’ We allowed that to flourish – to harken back to the so-called dark stories of the early Pixies repertoire, maybe there was something that felt a little bit gothic but felt right, like, ‘we do that pretty good’. There was a little bit of a sense of ‘gothic is probably gonna be our friend in this batch of songs, so without trying too hard let’s allow it to be there when it shows up, and if it does show up, let it fly.’”

The result is a record that feels like a yellowed storybook of 19th-century Americana, a compendium of fur-trader folklore, mid-western mythology and mountainfolk magick. Lenchantin’s lyrics for first single “On Graveyard Hill” concern a witch casting a curse over some wayward lover. “Silver Bullet” is the Byronesque tale of a condemned man wandering the night in search of a duel. The loping ragtime noir “This Is My Fate”, a sozzled cousin of Doolittle’s “Mr Grieves”, is about an alcoholic mule train driver working out in Death Valley, hooked on mandrake root. “There’s a Borax works out in the middle of Death Valley called Harmony, and these mule trains of 50 mules a day, they pull out,” says Thompson. “I wanted to intermingle with the spirit world, with life and death and with the mystical and a more surreal landscape.”

The record is populated with dark fairy tales, from the “selkie bride” of “St Nazaire” (“That’s Gaelic folklore for the seal woman,” Thompson explains, “a man falls in love with her and she removes her seal coat and takes on human form – as long as her seal coat is preserved she can don it again and return to the sea”) to the story of single of the year frontrunner “Catfish Kate”. The equal of any Pixies tune, it recounts an epic river battle between woman and catfish up in the mountains of South Dakota, as told by her boyfriend Black Jack Hooligan.

“I think the pedigree goes back to Scotland or whatever, the tales of Black Jack Hooligan. When I was a kid I’d hear stories, and I’m sure a lot of them were made up on the spot by my father, but there’s a few it seemed like he’d heard from somewhere and I’ve carried them through. I was kinda stuck on a lyric and I just spontaneously said ‘y’know what, I don’t know what people are gonna think about this but I’m going to tell the story of Catfish Kate’.”

Add a spot of reincarnation into the mix in the form of the gorgeously spectral “Daniel Boone”, inspired by Thompson’s near-collision with a deer en route to the studio, and one might start wondering if he has been dabbling in the supernatural himself of late.

“For me, music and performing music is a theatrical kind of thing,” he says. “Witches and ghosts and things like that are good enough for Shakespeare, so they’re good enough for me. Doesn’t everyone want to hear a spooky story, right? It’s not a question of whether I believe in something or not. All you’ve got to do is put on a history programme and ancient Brits and hear about what they believed and not be caught up in like, ‘oh how interesting, they thought that blah-bladdy-blah blah blah blah blah’. How could you not be attracted to that information? If you’re writing something, then you’re prone to incorporate that into your stew because how could you not? They’re the human belief systems, it’s not about what I believe.”

Black Francis: ‘Music is a theatrical kind of thing’ (Getty) (Getty Images)

The most telling autobiographical elements of Beneath The Eyrie are subliminal. Behind the album’s scenes, Thompson was undergoing a marital breakdown, which unwittingly seeped into tracks such as “In the Arms of Mrs Mark of Cain” and “Bird of Prey” (“You’ve stolen my tomorrow so I come for it today, you stole it when you stole my yesterday”).

“It isn’t even like I knew that that seemed to be happening in my life at the time,” he confesses. “But we’ve been performing a lot of these songs on the last tour we’ve been on, it feels like, ‘oh yeah, now I realise what this song is about’. Even though it’s maybe darker or sad or represents unhappy things in one’s life, it feels very grounded because it’s like ‘I’ve earned this, I’ve earned the right to sing what I’m singing’.”

Listen closely and you might even discern a little Morricone-inspired freshness in guitarist Joey Santiago’s trademark wails and snarls, since he completed a rehab course in 2016.“It was kind of a different person [who made Head Carrier],” Santiago says, “but someone who went back in his shoes more comfortably instead of running away and trying to find something different I just said ‘f*** it, this is what I am, I can’t really do anything else, it’s a good problem so stop whining, you’ve done this so long and people like it!’ I put a lot into this record, I delved into it more than any other record and it was fun, probably the most relaxed I’ve been on a record. I was trying to be more in the moment, more present.”

“When you’re drinking it isn’t necessarily bad,” Thompson adds. “It wasn’t like there was all this unexpected stuff that happened, musically. To his credit, whether he was a drinker or now as a non-drinker, while that may have a lot of effect on your personal life, Joey has always been very good about showing up to do the work, whatever was going on in his life. Whatever was different or difficult or challenging or new was really about him and his relationship to alcohol, as opposed to completely changing the dynamic of the band. The dynamic of the band feels exactly the same, it’s just better.”

All four Pixies speak enthusiastically about the solid, family feel of the band in 2019 – of their relaxed and creative studio bond with each other and their new regular producer Tom Dalgety and of Lenchantin’s invaluable contribution since she became the fully paid-up replacement for Kim Deal.

“Back of my head,” Santiago says, “I always wanna have a band out there that are ‘branded’ and have been around for so long – I can’t believe I’m even saying we’ve been around for 30 years – for a band to come out, have a break-up and do records later on, I just hope we’re one of those bands that makes that record and ‘a comeback’. They have such things going against them – the old fans, we lost an original, highly regarded member, to go against all the odds and make a great record. This is what it is and hopefully people will put aside their prejudices and give this a listen. It is good, but I hope people embrace it without this ‘oh no, they’re not gonna be the same’... but with ‘let’s listen to it anyway’.”

Are you in competition with your own legacy? “Of course we are, but that’s the gig,” Thompson argues. “You can’t have it both ways. We can’t be considered a band with a legacy and also, as the band continues over the decades, not expect any ‘hmm, well now I have to compete with my previous successes’. It’s like ‘no! I want to have success then and I want to have success now, with no challenges whatsoever and no one questioning my station!’ Doesn’t that kinda take the fun out of it?

“I was trying to explain it to my daughter who did very well in a kung fu competition the other day. She was afraid she was going to lose because there was a lot of competition there. That’s a normal enough feeling to have, but I did try to put it in a context to her and say ‘look, if everyone at the kung fu competition just sucked and you were the star student and you were gonna hands-down win, no questions asked, because you were good and they were all terrible, that wouldn’t be very much fun, probably. If it didn’t have that sense of competition you probably wouldn’t be interested in participating in it whatsoever’.

“I guess I feel the same way in my own music, whether I’m competing against other people or against myself or my past, all right, it is what it is, I’m not complaining about it. There’s gotta be some parameters, there’s gotta be some challenges, otherwise I might as well stick VR glasses on my head and put a feeding tube into my arm. That’s all part of being an artist, you can’t constantly be afraid of failing. It’s impressive those artists that never seem to fail, but some of my favourite artists, they fail.”

It’s not just the high bar of his own history that Thompson’s up against, though. As a band that’s pulled off one of rock’s finest comebacks, both on record and at their ferocious fire-and-brimstone live shows, and stand alongside descendants such as Idles and Wolf Alice in the latest wave of guitar rock revivalism, it must be frustrating that streaming has turned the singles charts into a closed shop for alternative music?

Thompson is philosophical on the matter. “Every band and every musician has its challenge in order to exist in the world and to compete in the world of showbiz. Every generation of musicians has its own particular challenges. Now, if you’re white and you’re male and you’re from the UK or America, I’m just gonna call bulls*** on any of your challenges. What’s this band that’s getting a lot of publicity now from Beirut [Mashrou’ Leila]? They’ve got the gay singer, have death threats, get their gigs cancelled – that’s a f***in’ challenge, that’s someone trying to shut you down, that’s someone trying to stop you in a very heavy, violent kind of way. All right, you’re not getting any radio exposure because of streaming or whatever, you’re competing with the internet, you’re competing with all these people that have short attention spans and smartphones, they’re not putting you up on a f***in’ pedestal like they were 30 years ago. Oh well, boo-hoo, welcome to showbiz.”

The 30 best album covers - ranked Show all 30 1 /30 The 30 best album covers - ranked The 30 best album covers - ranked 30) The Strokes – Is This It Photographer Colin Lane met the Strokes in early 2001, after being commissioned to shoot them for The Face magazine. The album cover happened by chance – after hanging out on another shoot a few weeks later, Lane heard the band’s art director hassling them to choose an album cover. He’d brought his portfolio with him, which included the now-infamous “ass shot”. The photograph, Lane later revealed in interviews, was taken in either late 1999 or 2000. His girlfriend had just got out of the shower, while he was playing with an old polaroid camera. He found a Chanel glove and asked her to pose. “Shooting on a Big Shot isn’t easy: you can only shoot from a specific distance, and it’s really designed for head-and-shoulders portraits,” he explained to The Guardian. “But when she slid the glove on and bent forward, I knew it was the perfect shot – simple, straightforward, graphic and just so sexy.” For fans, the image represents one of the last definable scenes in music. The 30 best album covers - ranked 29) The Notorious BIG – Ready to Die Biggie Smalls picked a baby resembling himself to star on the cover of his debut Ready to Die. By doing so, he summed up the album’s autobiographical content, which begins with childhood and closes with death. He also uses the notion of childhood innocence to foreshadow how our surroundings can have a lasting impact. The 30 best album covers - ranked 28) David Bowie – Aladdin Sane It might not be the quintessential David Bowie album, or the one that introduced fans to Starman. But the face staring back at you from this particular album cover is, undeniably, the most recognisable Bowie look: red mullet; a gaunt, sombre expression and that famous lightning bolt across his face. The 30 best album covers - ranked 27) Nas – Illmatic One of the greatest debut albums – and arguably the best hip hop record – of all time has a fittingly arresting cover image. A photo of a seven-year-old Nas was superimposed over Danny Clinch’s snapshot of one of the housing projects in the New York rapper’s native Queensbridge. Designed by Aimee Macauley, it was intended to reflect how the projects used to be Nas’s entire world, “until I educated myself to see there’s more out there”. But Nas was also inviting you to see through his eyes and into those very projects where he grew up, and feel immersed in that world via the power of his storytelling. The 30 best album covers - ranked 26) Kate Bush – The Dreaming Years after its release, Kate Bush noted how The Dreaming was deemed by many to be her “she’s gone mad” album. Its multiple, disparate narratives and metamorphic production intertwine with movie influences, particularly music hall crime capers of Houdini’s era. On the sepia-toned album cover, Bush plays the role of the escapist’s wife, looking to the distance, rather than at his face, as though trying to contact him via a different medium than mere speech. The way she holds his face in her hands gives her an additional, mesmerising power and conjures the old-world, eccentric mysticism with which she was – and still is – associated. The 30 best album covers - ranked 25) Oasis – Definitely Maybe Photographer Michael Spencer Jones had a task on his hands organising Oasis for what is indisputably their best album cover. It was different to what the band originally envisioned – Noel Gallagher had spotted a photo of the Beatles sat round a coffee in Japan, so thought Oasis could be photographed at the dining table of guitarist Bonehead’s house in Manchester. Jones didn’t see this working, so spread the members around Bonehead’s living room instead, and asked them to bring objects that were personal to them for decoration. Noel liked Jones’s idea of hanging an inflatable globe (brought by one of the roadies) from the ceiling. “Yeah, global dominance,” he said. Soon after the album’s release, that’s exactly what happened. The 30 best album covers - ranked 24) Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers Andy Warhol conceived the idea of a vinyl cover with working zipper that would reveal a pair of white briefs beneath the bulging jeans of a male model, who has to this day never been identified. Many fans assumed it was Mick Jagger, but people working on the shoot said several models were photographed and Warhol never revealed which one was used. It represented what the Rolling Stones quickly became famous for: an edgy, hyper-sexual kind of swagger. The 30 best album covers - ranked 23) Miles Davis – Bitches Brew German painter Mati Klarwein – who also created Santana’s artwork for Abraxas – was behind this gatefold cover that served as an embodiment of Davis’s creative manifesto. The surreal and complex renderings mirror what Davis does with the music itself; challenging traditional notions of structure and juxtaposing concepts of passivity and aggressiveness, anger and love. The 30 best album covers - ranked 22) AC/DC – Back in Black Back in Black’s all-black cover design fit the mood of a band emerging from dark times. In the wake of the death of vocalist Bon Scott, AC/DC had tracked down Brian Johnson, whom Scott had previously mentioned to the band. Certain people at their record label, Atlantic, weren’t so keen on the cover, but the band were insistent: it was a memorial to Scott. And now one of the most instantly recognisable and best-loved album covers in rock history. The 30 best album covers - ranked 21) Blondie – Parallel Lines Visually striking and symbolic of what Debbie Harry was doing both as a woman and an artist in the music industry, Parallel Lines’ cover was shot by photographer Edo Bertoglio. It was apparently rejected by the band but later chosen by their manager, Peter Leeds. The juxtaposition between the band, who beam in their matching dress suits like a bunch of schoolboys at their senior prom, and Harry, who stands defiant in her white dress, hands on hips, is wonderful. “I’m not impressed,” her stance seems to say. “Try harder.” The 30 best album covers - ranked 20) Bob Dylan – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan Dylan walks arm-in-arm with then-girlfriend and muse Suze Rotolo through the West Village in freezing New York, February 1963. Rotolo described the circumstances to the New York Times in 2008: “He wore a very thin jacket, because image was all. Our apartment was always cold, so I had a sweater on, plus I borrowed one of his big, bulky sweaters. On top of that I put on a coat. So I felt like an Italian sausage. Every time I look at that picture, I think I look fat.” Yet her memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, also noted the cover’s significance, how it “influenced the look of album covers precisely because of its casual down-home spontaneity and sensibility”. The 30 best album covers - ranked 19) Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin couldn’t have picked a better image to serve as a visual introduction to their fans. It’s an easy tactic – using a photo from a real-life tragedy, in this case the Hinderburg disaster, for shock factor. But it worked, and the cover went on to become one of the most indelible images in rock music. The 30 best album covers - ranked 18) Never Mind the Bollocks – Here’s the Sex Pistols “The album will last. The sleeve may not,” said the adverts for the Sex Pistols’ first and only studio album in 1977. The Sex Pistols were already controversial before the release of Never Mind the Bollocks – Here’s the Sex Pistols. They’d caused nationwide uproar for swearing on live TV, been fired from two record labels, and been banned from a number of live venues in England. Using the word “bollocks” on the front of their artwork caused instant censorship, and more controversy that would only benefit its performance. Despite many major retailers refusing to sell it, the album debuted at number one on the UK album charts. Today, it is arguably the most recognisable punk album cover in music history. The 30 best album covers - ranked 17) The Roots – Things Fall Apart For a limited time, The Roots’ Grammy-nominated album Things Fall Apart was available with five different covers, which reflected each of the world’s “greatest turmoils”. The most enduring was a photograph taken during a Civil Rights Movement-era riot – a stark black and white image showing riot police as they chase two terrified black teenagers. “This became the main artwork for a few reasons,” art director Kenny Gravillis told Complex magazine. “The cover felt like the urban community could really relate to it. Seeing real fear in the woman's face is very affecting. It feels unflinching and aggressive in its commentary on society. I remember going to Tower Records and seeing it huge; it was just so impactful. I'm not sure that it would work today. I give MCA respect for pushing it out at the time.” The 30 best album covers - ranked 16) Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here Yes, Dark Side of the Moon, with Storm Thorgerson's geometric design, is the most iconic of Pink Floyd covers. But the shot he conceived for Wish You Were Here – taken by Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell – is by far the more visceral. It shows two businessmen shaking hands, with one of them on fire, and to the band it represented the fear of revealing your true feelings for fear of “getting burnt”. Two stuntmen were involved, with one (Ronnie Rondell Jr) dressed in a fire-retardant outfit covered by a business suit, and his head protected by a hood, covered beneath a wig. Unfortunately, high winds meant he lost his moustache and eyebrows to the flames. Hopefully he felt the resulting shot was worth it. Fans definitely think so. The 30 best album covers - ranked 15) Fleetwood Mac – Rumours Just two of Fleetwood Mac’s then-five members appear on the cover of their best-selling and arguably greatest album. Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood’s legs are entwined, which serves as a pretty good metaphor for the entanglement between band members that resulted in so many of the record’s lyrical back-and-forths. And really it’s just a gorgeous, classic image, photographed and conceived by Herbert W Worthington with the band, and designed by Desmond Strobel. The 30 best album covers - ranked 14) Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz! The instantly iconic cover of It’s Blitz! shows little but says a lot. There’s a sense of female defiance in showing the woman’s hand, nails in red polish, crushing the egg, a symbol of fertility. It also embodies what the Yeah Yeah Yeahs did on this album, which is take traditional sounds, equipment and ideas and scramble them into something completely subversive. The 30 best album covers - ranked 13) Madonna – True Blue This shot was taken by celebrated photographer Herb Ritts, who later teamed up with Madonna for the “Like a Prayer” and “You Can Dance” covers. It is one of her most recognisable images, inspired in part by Andy Warhol’s pop art and also by the iconography of Madonna’s idol Marilyn Monroe. Here, she invites fans to make the immediate connection between pop art and commercial value, making her the first to exploit the late Eighties concept of pop artist as brand. The 30 best album covers - ranked 12) The Clash – London Calling The Clash paid tribute to Elvis Presley by mimicking the pink and green lettering from his 1956 self-titled album. Yet the image, one of the most iconic in rock history, blows that version of rock and roll to kingdom come: everything “safe” that the King had offered was replaced by Pennie Smith’s photograph of “the ultimate rock’n’roll moment – total loss of control”. Bassist Paul Simonon later told Fender that he’d smashed his guitar out of frustration with bouncers for not letting fans stand up from their seats at the Palladium in New York City. The captured moment is visceral, dangerous and anti-establishment – just like The Clash. The 30 best album covers - ranked 11) Elvis Presley – Elvis Presley Elvis Presley appears mid-belt on the cover of his self-titled album, clearly performing one of those iconic vocal whoops. It’s a visual introduction to rock’n’roll for his unsuspecting American audience, done 20 years before The Clash would replicate that classic pink and green lettering to do the same for their British fans. The 30 best album covers - ranked 10) NWA – Straight Outta Compton Six guys stare down toward the ground, one pointing a handgun right at the viewer. This is the cover art for Straight Outta Compton, the pioneering debut by NWA. The photographer was a 28-year-old white guy, Eric Poppleton, who was struggling to make ends meet after graduating from art school. He and his art director Kevin Hosman spent a day following the guys around alleys in LA, until Poppleton found a spot where he got on the ground and asked NWA’s members to stand over him, with one holding “what was hopefully an unloaded” gun. He had no idea the photograph would become one of the most iconic images in gangsta rap. Poppleton would go on to shoot four other NWA album covers. The 30 best album covers - ranked 9) Bruce Springsteen – Born in the USA The Boss tells you everything you need to know about him with one image. An epitome of the blue collar American, Springsteen’s seventh album cover was shot by Annie Leibowitz and shows the artist’s from behind, dressed in worn blue jeans and a simple white t-shirt, with a red cap hanging out of the back pocket after a long day’s grind. “We took a lot of different types of pictures,” said Springsteen, “and in the end, the picture of my ass looked better than the picture of my face.” Combined with the American flag in the background, the cover parallels the themes of Springsteen’s music. The 30 best album covers - ranked 8) The Ramones – The Ramones An album cover that would inspire future generations of bands to slouch moodily against brick walls. The Ramones were near-impossible to gather together for a posed photograph, but Robert Bayley – a photographer for Punk magazine, managed to get a shot that captured the band perfectly. Wearing ripped jeans and leather jackets, they stare blankly at the camera through sunglasses, or fringes that half-conceal their eyes. The 30 best album covers - ranked 7) The Beatles – Abbey Road Few album covers can profess to have literally stopped traffic, and it’s testament to the iconic status of Abbey Road’s artwork that thousands of fans have attempted to recreate it. The band, and photographer Iain McMillan, had just 10 minutes to get the shot, which was taken from a step-ladder while a police officer held up traffic behind the scenes. Six photos were taken, which McCartney later examined with a magnifying glass before making his decision. The 30 best album covers - ranked 6) Grace Jones – Island Life Before he tried to “break the internet” with a nude Kim Kardashian on the cover of Paper magazine, Jean-Paul Goude took some of the most memorable images of the Eighties for Grace Jones’s album Island Life. She appears on the cover in what looks like an impossible pose; it is, in fact, a composite of her in different positions, cut and pasted together for one of the most striking images in music history. The 30 best album covers - ranked 5) The Velvet Underground and Nico – The Velvet Underground and Nico Like the working zipper of The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, early versions of The Velvet Underground and Nico asked the owner to “Peel slowly and see”, upon which they’d peel the banana skin to reveal a flesh-coloured banana beneath. MGM was happy to fork out for the additional costs of manufacturing the vinyl, with the assumption that its ties to Warhol would help boost sales. It’s one of very few albums where the person behind the album art, rather than the band themselves or the album title, are named on the cover. The 30 best album covers - ranked 4) Joy Division – Unknown Pleasures The cover art for Joy Division’s debut album was designed by Peter Saville, who had previously created posters for Manchester’s Factor Club in the late Seventies. The chosen image, which was picked by Bernard Sumner, is based on radio waves from pulsar CP 1919 – from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. “The duochrome Peter Saville cover of this first Joy Division album speaks volumes,” Susie Goldring said in a review for BBC Online. “Its white on black lines reflect a pulse of power, a surge of bass, and raw angst. If the cover doesn't draw you in, the music will. The 30 best album covers - ranked 3) Nirvana – Nevermind Nirvana – Nevermind This is one of the most recognisable album covers of all time, and makes a fierce, mocking statement about the value western society places on chasing wealth – and the way it passes that message onto future generations. Record label Geffen were concerned by the appearance of three-month old Spencer Elden's penis on the cover, but Kurt Cobain would only accept a censor sticker over the image if it read: “If you're offended by this, you must be a closet paedophile.” The 30 best album covers - ranked 2) The Beatles – Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band With its star-studded cast and bold colour scheme, the cover of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came to define artist Peter Blake and also The Beatles themselves. There are 88 figures in all, including the band themselves, on a set photographed by Michael Cooper. Blake collected a list of names from three of the four Beatles. The list included Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and even Adolf Hitler (requested by John Lennon, and hidden behind other figures). If you bought the record, Blake later said, “you also bought a piece of art on exactly the level that I was aiming for”. The 30 best album covers - ranked 1) Patti Smith – Horses Critic Camille Paglia once suggested that Robert Mapplethorpe’s photo of his former lover, friend and collaborator Patti Smith is the greatest ever taken of a woman, and seeing it, you feel inclined to agree. The godmother of punk herself said she thought she looked like Frank Sinatra, dressed in a crisp white shirt with a black ribbon around her neck. A black jacket with a horse brooch on the lapel is slung casually over her shoulder. “The only rule we had was, Robert told me if I wore a white shirt, not to wear a dirty one,” Smith told NPR in 2010. “I got my favourite ribbon and my favourite jacket, and he took about 12 pictures. By the eighth one he said, 'I got it'.”

For all of the fantastical themes of the album, Beneath The Eyrie does tackle one major issue of our times. The closing two-minute campfire strumalong “Death Horizon” touches on climate change, albeit from within the broader context of the planet drifting inexorably into the sun in the long term anyway. And having written about ecological issues on “Monkey Gone to Heaven” back in 1989, is Thompson a supporter of Extinction Rebellion?

“It’s very interesting,” he says. “I don’t want to discourage any of that kind of energy because I think it’s a positive energy, but I’m also interested in a group of people in England that have an art and literary collective called The Dark Mountain Project. They have a website and they have get-togethers and publish books and support the arts and discussion, but their take is entirely different. The people that started that organisation have a background in science and ecology and I guess you could say they have kind of seen the destruction of the destruction of human civilisation as inevitable – we’ve already gone past the line and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop anything. The math says ‘no, this ends at some point down the road and it doesn’t really end well for homo sapiens’. But they also have a very positive kind of vibe in that they’re trying to articulate their feelings about all that. It’s not like they’re saying, ‘don’t live life’; they’re just saying life is finite as far as the human being part of it is concerned. They’ve just accepted it, said ‘this is our fate’.”

Have you signed up to go to Mars?

“Is that’s what’s going on?” Thompson chuckles. “I think that’s for a younger person. I’ll stay right here, I’ll go down with the ship.”