My all-time Top Ten

Regular readers may have noticed an embarrassing lacuna in this column. Having urged you to come up with your top ten albums of all time, to which you responded in such numbers, and with such entertaining and illuminating results, the sadist who set you the task has so far failed to deliver a selection of his own.

This isn’t a matter of cowardice or mere idleness on my part, I promise. For months now I have been cogitating on it, agonising about it, tearing up the list and starting all over again. But it’s been fun, too, listening to much-loved albums that had somehow been allowed to gather dust on my shelves, trying to separate the excellent from the absolutely essential, and to find room for as wide a variety of music as possible. So here it is at last, the Spencer all-time Top Ten as finally decided in the summer of 2010. By the autumn I’m sure it will have shifted again but then that of course is part of the pleasure. If you really love music, it is impossible to remain static in your tastes. In time-honoured tradition I’m presenting the list in reverse order, like Top of the Pops.

10. Kate and Anna McGarrigle. The eponymous first album by the folky Canadian sisters ranges from exuberant happiness to utter desolation, and such songs as ‘Kiss and Say Goodbye’, a celebration of love and desire, and ‘Heart Like a Wheel’, a lament for their death, deserve to be far better known than they are.

9. Rolled Gold, the Rolling Stones. Terrific compilation of the Stones in their first decade, ranging from the early rhythm and blues, through the psychedelia that many mock but I adore, to the classic years in the late Sixties and early Seventies when they really were the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world.