There Ain't Half Been Some Great Albums: P & Q Quiz

Answer: Janis Joplin

"Pearl" was Janis Joplin's second solo studio album and the fourth featuring her as lead singer. The first two had been recorded while she was lead vocalist in Big Brother and the Holding Company, the third as a solo artist backed up by the Kozmic Blues Band, and this one with the Full Tilt Boogie Band. It was also released posthumously since Joplin died of a heroin overdose in October 1970. At the time of Joplin's death, the album wasn't finished but enough stuff had been recorded to put it together. One track, "Buried Alive in the Blues", was bereft of Joplin's vocals so it was included on the album as an instrumental.

Although it was blatantly obvious from all Joplin's previous recordings that she was one of the greatest popular music talents of all time, she had always been let down by a mixture of inferior material, second-rate backing musicians, and awful production. That all changed on "Pearl" and it was exactly what the title said it was.

Answer: The Nation of Ulysses

"Plays Pretty for Baby" was Washingtonian group The Nation of Ulysses's second studio album after the equally brilliant debut "13-Point Program to Destroy America". What made the band so good was the eclecticism of the musical influences which ranged from free jazz to hardcore punk, blended with the Situationist attitude of the lyrics. By all accounts, they were a pretty full-on experience live too.

Unlike many similar groups, The Nation of Ulysses haven't become victims of their time and sound fresh years later. In fact, they sound much fresher than more recent bands who have attempted to do similarly grandiose things. That might be thanks to their avoidance of sloganeering and their application of a political position in a much broader sense than just preaching. It might just as easily be because they were a heck of a group.

Answer: Steely Dan

"Pretzel Logic" was Steely Dan's third studio album. I am very fond of the first two, "Countdown to Ecstasy" and "Can't Buy a Thrill", but it was on this one that the group's inimitable style was really set down. Said style might be described as elegant rock which employed jazz-derived riffs and runs, coupled with articulate lyrics, and nowhere was that more evident on "Pretzel Logic".

Steely Dan carved a career out of stylish rock music, but what fascinates me is how such dark cynicism managed to pass for light entertainment. The music was deceptively slick, and the lyrics just off-centre enough to lull the inattentive listener into thinking this was just more radio-friendly pap when in fact it was something much more. Despite my dislike for the apparently catch-all term post-modern, I can't really think of any other band so fitting of the title.

At the end of the day, what made Steely Dan is that they were exactly that, but also many other things, both more prosaic and even loftier.

Answer: AC/DC

"Powerage" was either the fourth or firth studio album by AC/DC depending on where you lived.

I've long thought "Powerage" was AC/DC's best album since it summed up all that had gone before, but was slightly more sophisticated in terms of songwriting. Furthermore, it had a rawer sound which made the group's approach to rock 'n' roll slightly more relevant, and the lyrics seemed to have gone beyond schoolboy humour and local-legend stories to something more universal. At the same time, the music had taken on a harder edge which was to come to the fore later on. To my ears, AC/DC later took on a slick sound which rendered them feeble, and to a certain extent ended up something of a self-parody.

Answer: Amon Düül II

"Phallus Dei" was Amon Düül II's debut album and introduced the world to a very weird and wonderful group. Right from the opening track, "Kanaan", with its enigmatic, exotic sounds, complex rhythms and wailing female vocals it was obvious that this was no ordinary rock album. 1969 was a groundbreaking year in many ways for popular music, and it's interesting that out of the spotlight this odd group were making such fascinating music.

The first side of the album was made up of four tracks, while side two was taken up by the lengthy title track. As with many debut albums, particularly from that time, "Phallus Dei" was essentially the group's live material recorded in a studio and it wasn't until later that they started putting together albums conceived as albums. However, what Amon Düül II were doing on stage was a country mile from what more conventional groups could ever imagine.

Amon Düül II spawned from the highly politicized arty commune scene of late 1960s Germany. In fact, even the group's name was taken from a notorious commune in Munich called Amon Düül. Originally the musical project associated with the commune was known simply as Amon Düül, but after a division occurred (over much more than the usual "musical differences"), two groups emerged: Amon Düül and Amon Düül II.

Answer: Kreator

"Pleasure to Kill" was German thrash metal band Kreator's second studio album. It was in much the same vein as their debut "Endless Pain" but was just that little bit sharper. 1986 was the apogee of thrash metal and Kreator were at that time neck and neck with bands who went on to huge success such as Metallica and Slayer. If anything, Kreator were the most ferocious of their peer group. They were certainly amongst the fastest of the fastest.

Kreator and this album have cropped up countless times on lists of bands who influenced subsequent extreme metal bands. Furthermore, Kreator were unapologetically obsessed with the theme of violence, which death metal bands later took to its illogical conclusion.

I know every nook and cranny of "Pleasure to Kill" after listening to it countless times back in the day. I don't play it quite so often these days but when I do, it still fires me up just like it used to.

Answer: Led Zeppelin

"Physical Graffiti" was Led Zeppelin's sixth studio album. Apparently it wasn't originally supposed to be a double album but they couldn't get it down to single album length, so they dusted off some bits and pieces left over from previous albums and made it a double. That should have been a recipe for disaster, but the group's musical breadth was so wide at that time that it actually turned it into the defining Led Zeppelin album.

Side two of "Physical Graffiti" was about as good as rock music will ever get: classic riff-heavy drive and thumping drums on "Houses of the Holy", the Stevie Wonder-esque funk of "Trampled Under Foot", and to my mind the group's signature song, "Kashmir".

Answer: Hawkwind

"Quark, Strangeness and Charm" was Hawkwind's seventh studio album. It was the second of three Hawkwind studio albums to feature Robert Calvert on vocals. I am quite partial to Calvert-era Hawkwind as he added a certain literary twist in the lyrics and an eccentric garnish to the performances. His time with the band in the late 1970s, actually his second stint although only his first as a full member, saw the music take on a catchier edge too. Unfortunately, Calvert was mentally unstable and his problems partly led to the group disbanding in 1978.

The aforementioned catchiness of Hawkwind in 1977 can't be heard anywhere better than on this album's title track. The song also displayed a drollery almost unheard of in the spacey world of Hawkwind.

Answer: Gorgoroth

"Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt" was Gorgoroth's eighth studio album. To say the group have had a troubled history would be a gross understatement since throughout their career they have been in and out of trouble both within the the group and also outside it.

"Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt", and to be fair much of Gorgoroth's stuff, often surprises the new listener as despite being one of the most extreme Norwegian black metal bands on and off stage, their music has always been reasonably accessible. That's not to say that "Quantos Possunt ad Satanitatem Trahunt" was a mainstream metal album, since it was anything but. It was in fact the aural version of an Italian 1980s zombie film, but as the analogy suggests it wasn't all at break-neck speed and the objective seemed to have been meaningful sinister darkness by whatever means possible.

Black metal is a criminally misunderstood genre, as can be heard from the awful bandwagon bands who have sprung up. To my ears at least, Gorgoroth on this album (and others) were the real deal.

Answer: The Who

"Quadrophenia" was the sixth studio album by The Who and their second double album. I'm really fond of it for many reasons, not all of them musical. I grew up in a time when there was a slight mods-versus-rockers revival, and since this album, and even more so the accompanying film, centred on the historic battles on the south coast of England which took place between youths identifying with these two subcultures, it was somewhat iconic. At the time, I was firmly in the rockers camp but I had what might seem like a guilty pleasure: I loved lots of so-called Mod music. I don't think I was the only one stuck between being a mod or a rocker, and daresay even Messrs. Moon, Entwistle, Daltrey and Townshend were equally bipartisan.

"Quadrophenia" was a great album even without all the cultural context. It sounded much less carefree than what the group had previously released and sounded arduous to make. Strangely, that was part of the attraction for me as it added a bit of ponderous weight.