There Ain't Half Been Some Great Albums: G Quiz

Answer: Creedence Clearwater Revival

"Green River" was Creedence's third studio album, and the second of the three album releases they made in 1969. It was preceded by the weaker "Bayou Country" and succeeded by the fantastic "Willy and the Poor Boys".

Side one is as good as Americana gets: "Green River", "Commotion", "Tombstone Shadow", and "Wrote a Song for Everyone". Side two is less memorable and the cover of Nappy Brown's oft-covered "Night Time Is the Right Time" seems a bit pointless, but the whole record has a great feel to it. In 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival sounded like a group who knew they just couldn't put a foot wrong.

Answer: The Wedding Present

"George Best", The Wedding Present's debut album, was named after the larger-than-life football player and bon vivant from Belfast.

I was 15 years old when "George Best" came out and The Wedding Present's frenetic, jangly pop and acerbic lyrics on songs like "Everyone Thinks He Looks Daft", "All This and More", "Give My Love to Kevin", and "Anyone Can Make a Mistake" were exactly what I needed to hear. Other so-called indie bands of the era could get either too maudlin or too grandiloquent, but The Wedding Present got it just right.

Although they made lots of great records, the group never really bettered their debut. They must have realised this since they toured the album again 20 years after its release to rapturous applause.

Answer: Burning Spear

Burning Spear is essentially singer Winston Rodney backed by a stellar array of Jamaican musicians and backing vocalists, such as Earl "Chinna" Smith and Valentine Chinon on guitars, Robbie Shakespeare and Aston Barrett on the all-important bass, and Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace behind the kit.

Burning Spear's third studio album, "Marcus Garvey", came out in December 1975 and then, as is quite common in reggae circles, a dub version came out some months later: that album is the fabulous "Garvey's Ghost". It's a bit of an oddity since most of the vocals have been lifted and it's mostly instrumental despite the fact that the artist is the singer. As much as I love the album "Marcus Garvey", there is something really haunting about the dub version.

Answer: The Dictators

"Go Girl Crazy!" was The Dictators' debut album. It wasn't exactly a huge-seller at the time, but its influence as a precursor to the impending rock 'n' roll revolution called punk has since been well-documented.

I've loved "Go Girl Crazy!" since I first picked it up in a second-hand record shop in the sleepy Worcestershire spa town of Malvern when I was about fourteen years old and staying with my grandparents for the summer holidays. I remember playing it on my grandparents' record player and enjoying seeing their jaws drop at the impudently silly lyrics and raw punky sound. I think they would have known how to react to something like the Sex Pistols (just turn it off), but this was at a level where getting irate would have made them blatantly ridiculous. This is certainly in my top ten favourite albums of all time.

As much as I love front-man Handsome Dick Manitoba (I managed to get him to autograph my vinyl copy's cover in the 2000s), in retrospect it's clear that bassist Adny (aka Andy) Shernoff is the genius mind behind the madness.

Answer: Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass

"Going Places" was one of Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass' most successful albums and contains some of their best loved tunes. "Spanish Flea" was their first top ten hit in the UK (number three), and it's probably the one most British people associate with them even though it wasn't an original. I first heard it on a comedy show called "The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer" in the 1990s when Vic Reeves pretended to play it through a mannequin's arm. I didn't know who it was by at the time, but when I ended up buying the album from a second-hand bargain bin, I remembered the sketch immediately.

The other stand-out song on the album has to be their crazy version of "The Third Man Theme". I didn't see the film until some years later and was quite disappointed when I heard the original.

Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass were hugely successful in their heyday, competing with the likes of The Beatles for sales. Many people have always assumed that Herb was of Hispanic or Latino descent, but actually he came from Eastern European Jewish roots. In fact, none of the group members were Hispanic. Herb once famously said the group was "Four lasagnas, two bagels, and an American cheese". And that's a lot of cheese.

Answer: Rush

"Grace Under Pressure" was Rush's tenth studio album and marked another turning point in the band's sound. Geddy Lee had been messing about with synthesizers for years, and if on "Grace Under Pressure's predecessor "Signals" they had become more prominent, now they were playing a leading role. Drummer Neil Peart started using electronic drums too, although not exclusively. However, guitarist Alex Lifeson seemed to have found a new lease of life and the album has some great edgy guitar.

On "Grace Under Pressure" they finally made an album where every song was a unit in its own right rather than being part of something else. As much as I love all that tomfoolery on earlier albums, it was time they moved on, in my opinion. Lyrically the album is very harsh, bleak, and cold, as is the music. It was 1984 after all.

Answer: Gillan

Gillan was the group which evolved out of the jazzy group, Ian Gillan formed after leaving Deep Purple in 1973, the Ian Gillan Band. Mr. Gillan decided he had gone as far as he could with the jazzy-rock thing and got back into straightforward rock music. To do this he got Irish guitar-ace Bernie Tormé, one of Tormé's chums John McCoy on bass, rock-scene veteran Mick Underwood on drums, and the keyboard wizard Colin Towns. He couldn't go wrong.

The result is an album of thoroughly enjoyable, sharp-edged, bluesy tunes that managed to shed both the pretensions of the Ian Gillan Band and the plodding dinosaur-rock of Deep Purple.

Answer: Battles

"Gloss Drop" was Battles second studio album. The group are often lazily referred to as an experimental rock band but what they do isn't all that strange, just not necessarily what you'd expect from a pop group. There's nothing avant-garde about rhythmic, instrumental music. In fact they do even have some vocal tracks, albeit some not singing recognizable words, but some doing just that. You even get pop star Gary Numan on the song "My Machines".

I daresay I'm in the minority, but I would have thought Battles should be the group of their era just like Led Zeppelin were of theirs. It's just people playing their instruments for the most part. They have absorbed a huge range of musical influences and filtered them down to something essential. They also have a fantastic drummer in John Stanier who, just like Bonham, is not just about virtuosity.

Answer: Melvins

The Melvins' debut album "Gluey Porch Treatments" is one of the iconic albums of heavy music. It's just so relentlessly heavy in a way the group's following albums, as brilliant as they have sometimes been, never really managed.

At the time, most heavy groups were getting faster and thrashier but the Melvins opted for measured, sinister dirge. What was quite unique about the group was that while most slow bands play long songs, the Melvins packed seventeen songs onto an album which clocked in at less than forty minutes, arguably the group wearing their punk credos on their sleeves.

Answer: Aerosmith

As good as Aerosmith's eponymous debut was, the follow-up, "Get Your Wings", was when the group really fell into their groove.

Right from the get-go on "Same Old Song and Dance", the guitars are weaving in and out of one another, and Steven Tyler is talking jive as if we all know what it all means. Next up is one of my all-time favourite Aerosmith songs, "Lord of the Thighs". It just about sums up classic Aerosmith with its slightly racy lyrics, snazzy as hell beat and, yes, Steven Tyler talking gibberish. Right from the very start, the album never falters.