The greatest concept album of all time, according to Iggy Pop
Despite being a punk icon, Iggy Pop has always had a delightfully diverse taste in music, and that’s only become even more evident with time since he’s started sharing his eclectic favourites of old and new on his BBC Radio 6 Music show.
Not only is he clued up on everything that was happening in parallel to the peak of his own career, but he’s hugely knowledgeable on everything he grew up listening to and has kept his finger firmly on the pulse of what’s happening in today’s music sphere, and not just within the punk and art rock circles he was originally operating in. With selections on his show ranging from the distant past to cutting-edge modern talent, and flitting between jazz and electronic music with smatterings of folk, country and everything in between, there’s no denying that Iggy is something of a fountain of knowledge.
Of course, he’s got a lot of love for his contemporaries such as David Bowie, and still speaks fondly of his collaborations with him in the 1970s and ‘80s. The same goes for Lou Reed, another artist who had a similarly encyclopaedic knowledge of different music despite having emerged from a specific scene, and Iggy acknowledges that these two were similarly able to dive into a variety of music and speak with a sense of authority on the matter.
However, when it comes to Iggy’s own favourite albums of all time, there are some unusual picks that you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with a figure such as him. He claims to love artists such as Marty Robbins, who he describes as being “as close as I get to country”, and Louis Armstrong, whose catalogue he describes as “eerie, scary, and sometimes ironic,” with his “really cool playing” always being the most attractive element of his work.
Both of these artists were amongst his dozen favourites that he picked out in a 2005 interview with Entertainment Weekly, but within this very selection, he named one concept album that he sees as being above all others in terms of its ambition, scope and brilliance. Not only that, but its 1955 release means that it is regularly cited as being one of the first concept albums ever made, which adds to it being regarded as such a landmark record in the history of popular music.
Frank Sinatra’s In The Wee Small Hours was the ninth studio release from the New Jersey crooner, and the record is often celebrated for the way it explores themes of loneliness, isolation and introspective viewpoints on collapsing relationships. Amongst the tracklist are several covers of jazz standards by Cole Porter, Duke Ellington and Hoagy Carmichael, but it’s the way that the song selection was curated that makes it such a stunningly tight album that follows a theme and concept from start to finish.
Iggy’s love of the album stems from the way that Sinatra manages to weave all of these themes into a cohesive narrative, and how he sings from a distinctive perspective in a way that no others had previously attempted. “This is a nice one,” he said of the album in the feature. “There’s such a cult around him, the buffs have a name for this period—his pathos period or something—where he sings songs of loss in an intimate setting. He excels at it.”
